id	author	title	date	pages	extension	mime	words	sentence	flesch	summary	cache	txt
ajiss-3645	Hanafi, Sari	Bilginin İslamileştirilmesi”nin Öncülüğünden Yaygınlaştırılmasına, Malezya Uluslararası İslam Üniversitesi Örneği 	2024-10-30	American Journal of Islam and Society; No. 1 (2021): İSLAM ve TOPLUM ARAŞTIRMALARI DERGİSİ, AMERİKA; 61-86	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v38i1.3645	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/3645/2781	1983 yılında kurulan Uluslararası İslam Üniversitesi Malezya (IIUM), “Bilginin İslamileştirilmesi” (Bİ) projesi için bir laboratuvar olmuştur. IIUM’nin teorik modellerini ve pratik uygulamalarını ele alan bu makalede, “Bİ” paradigmasına öncülük eden öğretim üyelerineslinden, onu yaygınlaştırmaya çalışan yeni nesle geçiş ortaya koyulmaktadır. Amaç, Makâsıdü’ş-Şerîa’nın kullanılmasıyla bu geçişin mümkün kılındığını, ancak yine de söz konusu geçişin bazı çelişkileri, gerilimleri ve eksiklikleri beraberinde getirdiğini ve getirmeyedevam edeceğini göstermektir. Makalenin sonunda ise üç noktanın üzerinde durulmaktadır. IIUM, profesyonel eğitimli öğrencilere karşı İslami yönelimli öğrenciler yetiştirme konusunda ne derece başarılı olmuştur? Makâsıd yaklaşımını kullanarak Bİ’nin yaygınlaştırılması ne ölçüde başarılı olmuştur? Ve son olarak Bİ paradigmasını hayata geçirmek çoğulculuğu nasıl sekteye uğratabilir?
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/3646	Naguib, Shuruq	İslam ve Toplumsal Cinsiyetin Epistemik Politikaları: Dekolonyal Bir Dönüm Noktası 	2024-10-30	American Journal of Islam and Society; No. 1 (2021): İSLAM ve TOPLUM ARAŞTIRMALARI DERGİSİ, AMERİKA	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v38i1.3646	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/3646/2782	İslami çalışmalar çerçevesinde bir analiz kategorisi olarak toplumsal cinsiyet üzerine eleştirel yaklaşımlar geliştirmenin hem entelektüel hem de kültürel zorlukları bulunmaktadır. Toplumsal cinsiyetin analitik açıdan önemli olduğu üstü kapalı bir şekilde kabul edilse de bu iki kategorinin kesişimiyle son derece tartışmalı bir araştırma alanı ortaya çıkmış, hedefleri, uygulamaları ve etkileri itibarıyla Müslümanların ve başka grupların içinde kutuplaşmalara yol açmıştır. Üstelik bu alanın uzmanları da çoğunlukla kadınlardan oluştuğu için cinsiyetlendirilmiş bir yapısı vardır. Genel olarak Kadın ve Toplumsal Cinsiyet Çalışmalarında da bulunan bu karakteristik özellik, söz konusu alanın çağdaş akademik camianın çeşitli disiplinlerinde marjinal bir epistemik ve kurumsal konumda bulunmasının nedenlerindendir. Aynısı İslam ve Toplumsal Cinsiyet için de geçerlidir ancak burada başka faktörlerin de rolü bulunmaktadır: İslamve Toplumsal Cinsiyet çalışmaları, çoğunlukla Müslüman ya da Müslüman geçmişi olan kadınlar tarafından yürütülmektedir. Dolayısıyla, Kadın ve Toplumsal Cinsiyet çalışmalarıyla bağdaştırılan marjinal anlayışlar burada hem hafifletilmekte hem de yeniden üretilmektedir.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/3648	Mufti, Malik	The Catholic Experience in America From Orestes Brownson to the Bozells: A Precedent for Muslims?	2025-11-10	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 42 No. 3-4 (2025): American Journal of Islam and Society; 42-73	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v42i3-4.3648	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/3648/2836	Muslim Americans confront the challenges of adapting to a liberal culture that is both formally tolerant and ideologically compelling; a culture often understood as growing out of the individualistic and anti-authoritarian features of the Protestant Reformation. Scholars such as Harold Bloom and Alan Wolfe have argued that due to its appeal, this dominant culture—what may be called the American creed—transforms all other faiths into variants of itself. They predict that a similar liberalizing assimilation will take place with Islam. In order to assess the validity of this prediction and its implications, this article looks at the experience of another religion that also came to America resistant to the individualistic focus of the American creed. It does so by tracing the evolution of American Catholicism beginning with perhaps its most influential exponent, the nineteenth-century convert Orestes Brownson. After reviewing—through demographic and public opinion data as well as the analyses of some leading contemporary Catholic thinkers—how successfully Catholicism has maintained its identity in the American context since Brownson’s time, the article concludes by considering the implications for Muslim Americans.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/3657	Warren, David	Editorial Note	2024-12-23	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 41 No. 3-4 (2024): American Journal of Islam and Society; 2-3	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v41i3-4.3657	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/3657/2784	This issue of the American Journal of Islam and Society (Volume 41 Nos. 3-4) comprises three main research articles, which respectively engage with the themes of political loyalty, justice and the just ruler, and popular preaching. We begin with Abdessamad Belhaj’s study, “Political Loyalty in Reformist Islamic Ethics: Resources and Limits.” We then turn to Fadi Zatari and Omar Fili’s contribution, “Justice and the Just Ruler in the Islamic Mirror of Princes.” For our third research article for this issue, we have Hatim Mahamid and Younis Abu Alhaija’s work, “Popular Religious Preaching as Informal Education and its Impact on Medieval Islamic Culture.” This issue of the AJIS also includes several book reviews, including Iymon Majid’s review essay “Integrating Kashmir.” Majid’s essay considers two recently published and important works, Shahla Hussain’s Kashmir in the Aftermath of Partition and Hafsa Kanjwal’s Colonizing Kashmir: State-Building under Indian Occupation. AJIS Volume 41 Nos. 3-4 ends with two insightful forum pieces. The first is Mohamed Alio’s contribution, “The Mazrui Dynasty: Serving Islam in East Africa” and the second is Shahzar Raza Khan’s piece on the famous Urdu poet Akbar Allahabadi.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/365	Mavani, Hamid	Ijtihad in Contemporary Shi`ism: Transition from Individual-oriented to Society-oriented	2010-07-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 27 No. 3 (2010): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 24-52	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v27i3.365	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/365/2099	The adoption of the Mu`tazili school of “rationalist” theology and the institution of ijtihad enabled Shi`i legal theory to exhibit vibrancy and made it adaptable to changing contingencies and circumstances. But because Shi`i jurists did not face the challenge of governing a state, their juridical focus and orientation remained fixated on resolving issues confronting the laity or their followers (muqallid) at a personal level and did not provide an ethical framework for the ijtihad process. The establishment of a Shi`i state in Iran in 1979, which forced them to tackle social, political, economic, educational, and cultural issues, demanded a change in orientation – away from the individual and toward society as the unit of analysis vis-à-vis ijtihad. They marshaled various methods, legal devices, and strategies to address contemporary social issues in order to provide pragmatic guidance to the citizens that would be in conformity with the moral and ethical principles laid out in the revelatory sources. This paper examines the writings of Ayatullahs Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, Muhammad Mahdi Shamsuddin, Sayyid Muhammad Husayn Fadlullah, and Ruhullah Musavi al-Khomeini and studies this phenomenon of change from individual-oriented ijtihad to society-oriented ijtihad.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/3665	Rosshandler, Kareem	The Golden Calf between Bible and Qurʾan: Scripture, Polemic, and Exegesis from Late Antiquity to Islam: (by Michael E. Pregill)	2025-06-20	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 42 No. 1-2 (2025): American Journal of Islam and Society; 121-127	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v42i1-2.3665	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/3665/2811	Michael Pregill’s The Golden Calf between Bible and Qurʾan draws from Jewish, Christian, and Muslim sources to understand how the story of the Israelites worshipping the Golden Calf has been understood across scriptural communities. This book marks the first time that the story has been the subject of a comprehensive comparative treatment. Drawing from Arabic, Aramaic, and Hebrew primary and exegetical sources, Pregill seeks to revive the earliest approach of Western scholarship towards the Qurʾan, that it should be understood as Biblical literature, or rather, late antique religious discourse. To this end, Pregill argues that the story’s employment in both the Hebrew Bible and the Qurʾan can be understood as a “continuities of discourse” rather than a communication of specific influences.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/3669	Dudgeon, Hamza	On the Scale of the World: The Formation of Black Anticolonial Thought: (by Musab Younis)	2025-06-20	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 42 No. 1-2 (2025): American Journal of Islam and Society; 112-120	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v42i1-2.3669	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/3669/2810	Musab Younis, originally from Manchester, completed his MPhil (2012) and DPhil (2017) in International Relations at Oxford, under Andrew Hurrell,1 where he later served as a College Lecturer in Politics at St Peter’s College. From 2018 to 2024, he was a Lecturer and then Senior Lecturer in Politics at Queen Mary University of London before returning to Oxford in 2024 as an Associate Professor of Political Theory. His research focuses on international political thought, theories of race and racism, empire, and anticolonialism during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, connecting historical perspectives on empire with contemporary political theory. His work explores anticolonial political thought, especially Black and African anticolonialism, the history of race and racism, and issues of space, scale, and globality such as the North vs. South division of the world. He is currently working on a monograph about the intellectual history of global inequality, tentatively entitled The Pillage of Distant Worlds, while also simultaneously pursuing projects on the intimate politics of imperialism, demographic catastrophism, settler colonialism, and the concepts of speed and self in anticolonial thought. He has published academically on anticolonialism, race, nationalisms, transnationalism, internationalisms, labor, etc. Moreover, Musab Younis has published articles in the London Review of Books, the Guardian, Prospect, Baffler, and n+1, among other outlets.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/366	Rizvi, Ali M.	Islamic Environmental Ethics and the Challenge of Anthropocentrism	2010-07-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 27 No. 3 (2010): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 53-78	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v27i3.366	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/366/2100	Lynn White’s seminal article on the historical roots of the ecological crisis, which inspired radical environmentalism, has cast suspicion upon religion as the source of modern anthropocentrism. To pave the way for a viable Islamic environmental ethics, charges of anthropocentrism need to be faced and rebutted. Therefore, the bulk of this paper will seek to establish the nonanthropocentric credentials of Islamic thought. Islam rejects all forms of anthropocentrism by insisting upon a transcendent God who is utterly unlike His creation. Humans share the attribute of being God’s creations with all other beings, which makes them internally related to every other being, indeed to every single entity in this universe. This solves the problem that radical environmentalism has failed to solve, namely, how to define our relation with nature and other beings without dissolving our specificity. Furthermore, Islamic ethics structures human relations strictly around the idea of limiting desires. The resulting ethico-legal synthesis, made workable by a pragmatic legal framework, can sustain a justifiable use of nature and its resources without exploiting them. The exploitation of nature is inherently linked to the exploitation of one’s self and of fellow human beings. Such exploitation, according to Qur’anic wisdom, is the direct result of ignoring the divine law and the ethics of dealing with self and “other.” Only by reverting to the divine law and ethics can exploitation be overcome. The paper ends by briefly considering possible objections and challenges vis-à-vis developing a philosophically viable yet religiously oriented environmental ethics.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/3677	Lamallam, Mohamed	The Islamic Secular: (By SHERMAN JACKSON)	2025-11-10	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 42 No. 3-4 (2025): American Journal of Islam and Society; 138-142	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v42i3-4.3677	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/3677/2840	The relationship between Islam and the state (or, more broadly, the place of religion in the modern, “secular” world) remains a vibrant topic in academic and public discourse. However, the central categories in this debate—notably, “religion/religious,” “Islam/Islamic,” and “the secular/secularism”—are often contested or insufficiently defined. Their usage is further shaped by scholars’ interpretations of their historical origins or by assumptions about how these domains of thought and practice ought to function in modern societies.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/367	Jalajel, David	Ethical Objections to Evolution in Contemporary Muslim Thought	2010-07-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 27 No. 3 (2010): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 79-92	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v27i3.367	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/367/2101	Muslim creationists often argue that the theory of evolution is inherently unethical, claiming that concepts such as natural selection, survival of the fittest, and differential reproductive success promote behaviors like selfishness, violence, and sex- ual promiscuity. This article explores the distinctions made by classical Islamic theologians between God’s actions and human- ity’s actions and their potential to address ethical objections to evolution. The question is examined with reference to two theological traditions: the Ash`ari and the Salafi. The first one distinguishes between God’s creation of actions and humanity’s acquisition (kasab) of actions. According to this approach, ethical valuation is understood to be an attribute of human volitional action. The second approach, followed by Ibn Taymiyyah, Ibn al-Qayyim, Ibn Abu al-`Izz, and others of the so-called Salafi tradition, distinguishes between God’s existential (kawni) will and legislative (shar`i) will. According to it, ethical valuation is restricted to the domain of what God legislates for His volitional creatures. Although these approaches differ in how they contextualize ethical behavior, both of them place ethical valuation strictly within the context of human volitional action. As a consequence, God’s actions in creation (and therefore what is observed in nature) can neither be taken as a pattern for determining ethical norms nor judged according to the ethical norms appropriate for human beings. The paper concludes that by making these distinctions, classical Islamic theology has the potential to effectively counter ethical objections to evolutionary theory.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/368	Hashem, Mazen	Asserting Religious Text in the Modern World: Muslim Friday Khutbahs	2010-10-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 27 No. 4 (2010): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 1-22	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v27i4.368	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/368/2092	The khutbah delivered each Friday in mosques represents an important facet of the Muslims’ religious imagination. Islam, being an ultra-scriptural religion, requires that those who deliver this sermon, the khatib, engage in a wide range of creative handling of texts. The khutbah stands as concentric circles of belonging to a text-rooted religion and to the continuous realignment of those texts when addressing social reality; the khatib stands as an interpreter of lived experiences as well as a maker and shaper of such experiences. The quest of relevance in the khutbah is counterbalanced by the quest for authenticity. This discourse analysis study, which analyzes two years’ worth of khutbahs delivered in Southern California, focuses on three interrelated dimensions of khutbahs: how certain texts assert their authority, the different approaches to contextualizing the text, and how texts are reinterpreted in the face of the challenges of modernity.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/3692	Sax, Benjamin	Following Similar Paths: What American Jews and Muslims Can Learn From One Another: (by Samuel C. Heilman and Mucahit Bilici)	2025-06-20	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 42 No. 1-2 (2025): American Journal of Islam and Society; 138-142	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v42i1-2.3692	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/3692/2814	As the dust settled on the 2024 U.S. presidential election, a few demographic trends came into focus. Perhaps one important trend saw that the war in Gaza was an incredibly divisive issue for Democrats. Frustrated by what they perceived to be as President Biden’s indifference toward Palestinian suffering and political self-determination, many Arab and Muslim American activists decided not to vote for the Democratic nominee for President, Vice President Kamala Harris. Traditionally, Muslim American communities such as those in Dearborn, Michigan, which were Democratic strongholds, interpreted the atrocities in Gaza as a genocide and refused to support the Democratic candidate. They did not fill in a vote for either presidential candidate. Interestingly, only twenty percent of Jewish Americans did not vote for Vice President Harris. Yet, unlike most of their Muslim American neighbors, this twenty percent voted for President Trump, primarily because of his unequivocal support for the state of Israel and his support of its current right-wing, authoritarian nationalist government there. Most of these Jewish Americans were members of Orthodox Jewish communities, who were both fearful of and outraged by Hamas’ murderous rampage on October 7, 2023. These two communities seem to be living in two starkly separate political and religious realities.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/3696	Mithaiwala, Nazish	Fatwa and the Making and Renewal of Islamic Law: From the Classical Period to the Present: (By OMER AWASS)	2025-11-10	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 42 No. 3-4 (2025): American Journal of Islam and Society; 162-167	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v42i3-4.3696	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/3696/2845	Islamic law, its classical origins and modern resurgence, has been the subject of increasing attention in academia. Whereas previous literature in the area of Islamic law often carried orientalist leanings, modern research attempts to re-evaluate the Islamic legal tradition on its own merits. Dr. Omer Awass contributes to this effort in, Fatwa and the Making and Renewal of Islamic Law: From the Classical Period to the Present. Awass examines the formation, history, and transformation of Islamic legal discourse and institutions through the lens of the fatwa, or legal opinion. He explores how the issuing of fatwas was influential in the development of the legal tradition generally, while at the same time serving as a social instrument that contributed to the formation of the Muslim societies. Awass’ investigation of fatwas is historically contextualized and he demonstrates legal development through his selection of fatwas. Furthermore, his analysis provides a fascinating window into the minds of renowned Muslim jurists and their engagement with the legal tradition. Finally, while Awass’ main focus is on the Sunnī legal tradition, his inclusion of non-Sunnī sects, Zaydī and Ibāḍī traditions respectively, while informative, could be improved with a stronger comparative context.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/369	Amin, Ruzita Mohd.	A Decade of the World Trade Organization and the Trade Performance of Muslim Countries	2010-10-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 27 No. 4 (2010): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 23-44	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v27i4.369	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/369/2095	The World Trade Organization (WTO), established on 1 January 1995 as a successor to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), has played an important role in promoting global free trade. The implementation of its agreements, however, has not been smooth and easy. In fact this has been particularly difficult for developing countries, since they are expected to be on a level playing field with the developed countries. After more than a decade of existence, it is worth looking at the WTO’s impact on developing countries, particularly Muslim countries. This paper focuses mainly on the performance of merchandise trade of Muslim countries after they joined the WTO. I first analyze their participation in world merchandise trade and highlight their trade characteristics in general. This is then followed by a short discussion on the implications of WTO agreements on Muslim countries and some recommendations on how to face this challenge.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/370	Shah, Sayed Sikandar; Mahmud, Mek Wok	Critical Thinking and Its Implications for Contemporary Ijtihad	2010-10-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 27 No. 4 (2010): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 45-67	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v27i4.370	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/370/2096	As an intellectual process, critical thinking plays a dynamic role in reconstructing human thought. In Islamic legal thought, this intellectual tool was pivotal in building a full-fledged jurisprudential system during the golden age of Islamic civilization. With the solidification of the science of Islamic legal theory and the entrenchment of classical Islamic jurisprudence, this process abated somewhat. Recent Islamic revival movements have engendered a great zeal for reinstituting this process. The current state of affairs in constructing and reconstructing Islamic jurisprudence by and large do not, however, reflect the dynamic feature of intellectual thought in this particular discipline. Thus this article attempts to briefly delineate this concept, unveil the reality on the ground, and identify some hands-on strategies for applying critical thinking in contemporary ijtihad.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/371	Rayan, Sobhi	Ibn Taymiyya’s Criticism of Aristotelian Definition	2010-10-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 27 No. 4 (2010): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 68-91	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v27i4.371	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/371/2097	Aristotle wrote of two “points of definition”: one posited in negative and the other in positive terms. The negative formulation argues that concepts can be comprehended only through definition, while the positive point stresses the consequences of definition by focusing on the benefits to the sciences achieved through those “concepts.” Ibn Taymiyya criticizes these ideas on the grounds that definition neither necessarily leads to the revelation of the facts and truths of things and their quiddities, nor does it necessarily help in developing the sciences. We notice that his main criticism is directed at specific metaphysical elements of definition, such as genus, species, differences (differentia/ divisions), quiddity, and universality. He argues that these elements are purely mental and do not necessarily correspond to existence. Ibn Taymiyya differentiates between metaphysics and the concrete physical world for, in his opinion, not all that comes to mind necessarily corresponds to existing objects in the concrete physical world. Therefore, human knowledge should be established on concrete rules subject to experiment. He therefore refutes the logic of quiddity, which depends upon pure intellect, and calls for an experimental logic devoid of metaphysics.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/3722	Reda, Nevin	The Oxford Handbook of Islam and Women: (by Asmaa Afsaruddine, Ed.)	2025-06-20	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 42 No. 1-2 (2025): American Journal of Islam and Society; 133-137	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v42i1-2.3722	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/3722/2813	There is no doubt that the topic of Islam and women has received a great deal of scholarly attention from different vantage points that serve competing interests and claims. Amidst this plethora of discourses, Asma Afsaruddin’s edited volume The Oxford Handbook of Islam and Women sheds light on the multi-faceted and diverse nature of Muslim women’s lives in the past and in the present. As Afsaruddin points out in the introduction, the volume is in conversation with some of the politicization and the idealization that the topic has encountered in both lay and academic circles, and attempts to provide a more nuanced and historicized approach that better reflects Muslim women’s lived experiences, perspectives, and manifold contributions to the Islamic tradition. It makes for a valuable reference work that helps readers navigate the minefield of political and other ideologies that revolve around Muslim women.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/3723	Rashid, Hussein	Muslim Prayer in American Public Life: (by Rose Aslan)	2025-06-20	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 42 No. 1-2 (2025): American Journal of Islam and Society; 128-132	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v42i1-2.3723	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/3723/2812	The volume The Practice of Islam in America, edited by Edward E. Curtis, was released in 2017. It was an important work because it was a volume that took American Muslim ritual life as an primary source of study. It helped explain rituals and explored their manifestations in a variety of American Muslim contexts. Since then, there have been very few works on American Muslim ritual life. In the interests of transparency, I should note that both Rose Aslan and I contributed chapters to that volume. Aslan’s piece was on prayer, based on the work she was doing for the volume under review. Her monograph is a welcome addition to the exploration of American Muslim ritual life.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/3724	Bilkis Bharucha	Islam, Science, and the Environment: An Application of Ibrahim Kalin’s “Three Views of Science in the Islamic World”	2025-11-10	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 42 No. 3-4 (2025): American Journal of Islam and Society; 98-120	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v39i3--4.3724	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/3724/2838	Contemporary discussions on Islam and science are highly variegated, often taking on fundamentally opposite assumptions. The remarkable divergence in the basic methods and assumptions underlying publications in this field make any meta-study, or comparison between approaches, nearly impossible. One pragmatic meta-framework of Islam and science that incorporates a wide range of views and provides meaningful distinctions between them is suggested by Ibrahim Kalin. In his chapter titled, “Three Views of Science in the Islamic World,” Kalin identifies three (non-exhaustive) Islamic critiques of science, which he labels as: ‘ethical/puritanical’; ‘epistemological’; and ‘ontological/metaphysical’. Applying Kalin’s framework to contemporary publications on Islam and the environment offers a rich analysis, enabling us to identify attempts at the instrumentalization of Islamic ethics, hermeneutics, and metaphysics, as well as identify contact points between religion and science.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/372	Aziz, Muhammad	A Short Survey of Yemeni Sufism from Its Inception up to the Thirteenth Century	2009-01-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 26 No. 1 (2009): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 1-19	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v26i1.372	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/372/2129	This paper analyzes the historical conditions of Yemen’s Sufi movement from the beginning of Islam up to the rise of the Rasulid dynasty in the thirteenth century. This is a very difficult task, given the lack of adequate sources and sufficient academic attention in both the East and theWest. Certainly, a few sentences about the subject can be found scattered in Sufi literature at large, but a respectable study of the period’s mysticism can hardly be found.1 Thus, I will focus on the major authorities who first contributed to the ascetic movement’s development, discuss why a major decline of intellectual activities occurred in many metropolises, and if the existing ascetic conditions were transformed into mystical tendencies during the ninth century due to the alleged impact ofDhu’n-Nun al-Misri (d. 860). This is followed by a brief discussion ofwhat contributed to the revival of the country’s intellectual and economic activities. After that, I will attempt to portray the status of the major ascetics and prominent mystics credited with spreading and diffusing the so-called Islamic saintly miracles (karamat). The trademark of both ascetics and mystics across the centuries, this feature became more prevalent fromthe beginning of the twelfth century onward. I will conclude with a brief note on the most three celebrated figures of Yemen’s religious and cultural history: Abu al-Ghayth ibn Jamil (d. 1253) and his rival Ahmad ibn `Alwan (d. 1266) from the mountainous area, andMuhammad ibn `Ali al-`Alawi, known as al-Faqih al-Muqaddam (d. 1256), from Hadramawt.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/3737	Zaman, Muntasir	Qiṣṣat ḥayāt al-Bukhārī: Sīra tārīkhiyya jadīda: (by Aḥmad al-Aqṭash)	2025-06-20	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 42 No. 1-2 (2025): American Journal of Islam and Society; 148-153	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v42i1-2.3737	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/3737/2816	Few works in Islamic intellectual history have received as much attention as Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī. With hundreds of premodern and modern studies dedicated to its name, one might assume that little room remains for groundbreaking insights. Khaldūn al-Aḥdab’s recently revised study and the introduction to the Bayt al-Sunna edition of Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī have made significant contributions to our understanding of Imam al-Bukhārī’s life and works. Yet, Aḥmad al-Aqṭash’s highly anticipated monograph manages to push the boundaries of an extensively studied subject even further. If al-Aqṭash’s gloss on Abū Masʿūd al-Dimashqī’s Jawāb is any indication, he possesses an exceptional mastery of the hadith sciences and is thus well-equipped to engage with the subject at hand.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/373	Ibrahim, Zakyi	A Prophet or a Messenger: How Bona Fide a Qur’anic Concept?	2009-01-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 26 No. 1 (2009): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 20-46	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v26i1.373	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/373/2130	This paper probes specific questions in the Qur’an on various prophetic phenomenon (e.g., the purpose of revelation to prophets/messengers, the question of sending them, and the meaning of book/scripture) in order to ascertain whether or not the popular theories on their essence have valid Qur’anic support. It hypothesizes that the major conclusions on this subject have no solid Qur’anic evidence, that prophets and messengers are one and the same person, and that the Qur’an uses both terms interchangeably. Specific treatments of the questions (heavily dependent on the Qur’an) are preceded by their simple depiction in a diagram. Fresh attempts are made to redefine the terms prophet and messenger. I begin by reviewing the conclusions of al-Mawardi, al-Qadi ‘Iyad, Ibn Taymiyyah, and Abu Bakr al-Jaza’iri, all of whom have, in what came to be extremely popular concepts, distinguished between prophets and messengers. Following suit, the ideas of some leading western scholars on this subject (e.g., A. J. Winsinck, Joseph Horovitz, and Willem A. Bijlefeld) are also reviewed and assessed.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/3745	Gada, Mohd Yaseen	Maulana Azad: A Life: (By S. IRFAN HABIB)	2025-11-10	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 42 No. 3-4 (2025): American Journal of Islam and Society; 172-176	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v42i3-4.3745	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/3745/2847	Mawlana Abul Kalam Azad, a multifaceted figure, was celebrated as athinker, orator, journalist, politician, leader, and Muslim intellectual, witha deep understanding of both Islamic and contemporary knowledge. S.Irfan Habib’s Maulana Azad: A Life offers a comprehensive and freshbiographical account, exploring key moments that shaped Azad’s lifeand remain relevant today (p. 2). S. Irfan Habib (b. 1931) is a prominentIndian historian of ancient and medieval India and the former AbulKalam Azad Chair at the National Institute of Educational Planning andAdministration. The book challenges prevailing historical narratives,aiming to dismantle stereotypes about the past (p. 10). Structured thematically,it includes five chapters, along with an introduction and an epilogue.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/374	Toor, Shamas-Ur-Rehman	Developing Management from Islamic Perspectives (MIP) as a Formal Academic Discipline	2009-01-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 26 No. 1 (2009): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 47-69	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v26i1.374	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/374/2131	Management from Islamic Perspectives (MIP) is an emerging field that has begun to attract scholarly attention. However, the research undertaken so far has been rather fragmented and lack a clear agenda. This paper presents a literature review of the field and the areas of current focus. Although the field has a huge growth potential, I argue that it faces several challenges and problems as it develops further. I outline these potential pitfalls, suggest how to develop MIP as a formal discipline, and explain how to integrate it within real-life business practices. The article closes with a call for research to be conducted in a more organized fashion through an international consortium of researchers as well as recommendations for future research directions.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/3758	ERIOUICHE, Mohammed	Islamic Jurisprudence, Islamic Law, and Modernity: (By MOHAMMAD H. FADEL)	2025-11-10	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 42 No. 3-4 (2025): American Journal of Islam and Society; 143-147	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v42i3-4.3758	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/3758/2841	Thomas Kuhn’s concept of the “paradigm shift” in scientific revolutions provides a compelling framework for understanding the role of taqlīd in Islamic law. Just as Kuhn argued that scientific progress occurs through shifts between dominant paradigms rather than through a linear accumulation of knowledge, Mohammad H. Fadel suggests that taqlīd serves as a stabilizing force within Islamic jurisprudence, ensuring continuity amid evolving legal interpretations. While often viewed as an impediment to legal innovation, taqlīd, in Fadel’s analysis, functions as an institutional mechanism that enables both preservation and controlled adaptation of Islamic law over time. This review examines Fadel’s contributions to the discourse on taqlīd, highlighting its social logic, epistemological foundations, and implications for modern Islamic legal reform.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/375	Adeel, M. Ashraf	Diversity and Exclusivity: A Religion Needs Both	2009-01-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 26 No. 1 (2009): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 70-85	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v26i1.375	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/375/2132	It is argued that religions seem to insist, paradoxically, on both exclusivity and diversity to inspire passionate commitment on the one hand and to allow for genuine choice of religion on the other. The argument is developed with special reference to Islam, with hints of similar strands of thought in Judaism and Christianity. The paradoxicality of this position of religions is similar to Kierkegaard’s interpretation of faith, as exhibited byAbraham in his sacrifice. Interpreting religions in this way provides us with a better context for understanding the exclusivism/pluralism debate.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/3765	Tahiiev, Akif	Shiʿi Materiality Beyond Karbala: Religion That Matters: (FOUAD GEHAD MAREI, YAFA SHANNEIK, AND CHRISTIAN FUNKE, EDS.)	2025-11-10	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 42 No. 3-4 (2025): American Journal of Islam and Society; 122-137	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v42i3-4.3765	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/3765/2839	In recent years, the field of Shiʿi studies has undergone a significant transformation, expanding beyond traditional religious, theological, and historical inquiries to encompass a more nuanced exploration of the material and sensory dimensions of Shiʿi religiosity. While earlier scholarship on Shiʿism focused heavily on its foundational texts, rituals, and political movements, there has been a growing recognition of the importance of material culture in shaping religious experience. Shiʿi Materiality Beyond Karbala: Religion That Matters marks a pivotal moment in this scholarly evolution, offering a fresh, interdisciplinary approach to understanding Shiʿi devotion through objects, spaces, substances, and sensory experiences. The volume moves beyond the familiar focus on Karbala and Ashura, turning attention to how materiality mediates the sacred, sustains communal identity, and facilitates encounters with the divine across diverse contexts. By engaging with fields such as Religious Studies, Material Religion, Anthropology of Religion, and Media Studies, this book provides a ground-breaking perspective on the multisensory and material aspects of Shiʿi life, reflecting a much-needed shift in the study of religion and material culture.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/376	Swazo, Norman K.	Rehabilitating Islamic Ethics: A “Postmodern” Opportunity for Contemporary Islam	2009-04-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 26 No. 2 (2009): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 1-22	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v26i2.376	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/376/2125	The debate between modernity and postmodernity in western discourses about law and morality calls for a similar debate in contemporary Islam. For Islam, the question is whether a rehabilitation of its classical discipline of ethics (`ilm al-akhlaq) may contribute to international morality even as it disabuses Islam of privileging Islamic jurisprudence (`ilm al-fiqh), which conceives of the Shari`ah as merely law. Islam’s strong tradition of ethical discourse is similar to the West’s classical and contemporary formulations of virtue ethics. Such a renewal constitutes a postmodern opportunity for contemporary Islam as it faces the globalization of western values and jurisprudence.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/377	Marandi, Seyed Mohammad; Pirnajmuddin, Hossein	Constructing an Axis of Evil: Iranian Memoirs in the “Land of the Free”	2009-04-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 26 No. 2 (2009): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 23-47	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v26i2.377	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/377/2126	A major phenomenon in recent decades within Orientalist discourse is the indigenous Orientalism that can be seen in the works of some scholars, writers, and thinkers. These writers are sometimes referred to as “captive minds,” “brown sahibs,” or what Malcolm X would call the “houseNegro.”1 Defined by their intellectual bondage and dependence on the West and, at times, likened to pop psychologists in their writings about the “natives,” their western counterparts believe them because, as native informants, they are seen to be in a position to produce authentic representations of the Oriental psyche. This paper offers a brief study of memoirs written by members of the Iranian diaspora in western countries over the past decade, particularly in the United States. Among these writers are Azar Nafisi, Marjane Satrapi, Roya Hakakian, Afshin Molavi, and Azadeh Moaveni, and others. A few books with thriller-like titles, such as Prisoner of Tehran (Marina Nemat: 2008) or Living in Hell (Ghazal Omid: 2005), will not be studied. In the eyes of many Iranian intellectuals, such writers are often viewed as examples of the Iranian intellectual comprador class or members of the gharbzadeh (a term made current by JalalAle-Ahmad, the Iranian critic and intellectual, that can be rendered in English as westernized, west-struck, or westomaniac), rather than as intellectuals.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/378	Dadoo, Yousuf	The Consolidation and Spread of Islam in South Africa	2009-04-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 26 No. 2 (2009): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 48-78	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v26i2.378	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/378/2127	Much has been written about Islam’s advent, entrenchment, and spread in specific regions of South Africa, and other writings cover its advent over the entire country. And yet no sufficient academic scrutiny of factors that have contributed to its consolidation and spread in recent times has been undertaken. By researching this issue, the problems and challenges confronting Islam at present and in the foreseeable future will be better appreciated. After presenting a brief synopsis of Islam’s advent South Africa, I assess how it was consolidated and then tackle its spread while underscoring specific successes and failures. Where necessary, the names of individuals are mentioned. The divergent nature of Islamic faith and practice is constantly stressed. The topic is a fascinating field of study in which sometimes contradictory forces strive for hegemony. Finally, a possible solution to this problem is presented.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/3791	Warren, David H.	Editorial Note	2025-06-20	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 42 No. 1-2 (2025): American Journal of Islam and Society; 2-4	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v42i1-2.3791	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/3791/2806	This issue of the American Journal of Islam and Society comprises three primary research articles, which respectively engage the themes of political obedience, the relationship between religiosity and sustainable behavior, and the interpretation of texts. First, we have Bachar Bakour’s article, “Reconceptualizing Political Obedience in Islamic Thought: An Analytical study of Ḥadīth Literature.” Bakour examines the highly important question – both historically and today – of obedience to the ruler in the Islamic tradition. Next, we have the intriguing and exhaustively researched work by Sahibzada Muhammad Hamza and Nasim Shah Shirazi, “The Role of Religiosity in Shaping Sustainable Behavior: A Global Perspective.” Their article provides an important contribution to the current literature on sustainable behavior and religiosity by moving beyond small studies of local contexts to provide a global analysis over several decades. Our third research article for this issue is Naveed Anjum’s study, “Textual Authority and Modern Urdū Exegetical Interpretations: A Case Study of Q.4:34.” Here, Anjum provides a thoroughgoing exploration of key South Asian exegetes writing in Urdū in the modern period, ranging from the 20th century to today. Lastly, this issue also includes an insightful forum piece by Ismail Hashim Abubakar on scholarly debates in Nigeria around the phenom­enon of the Boko Haram insurgency. Taken together, these contributions offer a wide range of thought-provoking and insightful points of departures for further exploration in a diversity of fields.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/3794	Икбал, Басит Карим	От редакции	2025-06-05	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 39 No. 1--2 (2022): АМЕРИКАНСКИЙ ЖУРНАЛ ИСЛАМА И ОБЩЕСТВА; 7-8	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v39i1--2.3794	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/3794/2796	Четыре статьи, две рецензии-эссе, несколько обзоров книг инекролог, содержащиеся в этом выпуске, посвящены спорам обавторитетности в исламе. Примечательно, что две из этих ста-тей взяты из симпозиума Американского журнала ислама и об-щества по теме Мак̣ас̣ид, первая серия статей из которого былапредставлена в предыдущем выпуске (38:3-4), посвященномэтой теме.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/3795	Миан, Али Алтаф	Агенты милости: этическая агентность между Г̣аза̄лӣ и антропологией ислама	2025-06-05	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 39 No. 1--2 (2022): АМЕРИКАНСКИЙ ЖУРНАЛ ИСЛАМА И ОБЩЕСТВА; 125-156	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v39i1--2.3795	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/3795/2799	Эта статья вносит вклад в теоретизирование этичес-кой агентности в антропологии ислама, обращаяськ средневековому богослову в области нравствен-ности Абӯ Х̣а̄миду ал-Г̣аза̄лӣ (1058-1111). Основы-ваясь на взаимодействии Талала Асада с Г̣аза̄лӣ,автор внимательно рассматривает труд последнегооб интенциональности, в полной мере освещающийего теорию этической агентности. Га̣ за̄лӣ не разра-батывает идеалистическую теорию этической агент-ности и не утверждает этический субъект, практикикоторого «направлены на то, чтобы сделать опреде-ленные виды поведения бессознательными или не-преднамеренными» (Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety,139). Скорее, он артикулирует этическую агентностькак место случайности и амбивалентности, посколь-ку действие включает в себя не только знание, твер-дое намерение/волю и телесные способности, но ибожественную милость. Милость, как утверждаетсяв данной статье, является условным знаком несуве-ренности этического субъекта, поскольку для Г̣аза̄-лӣ агентность разделена между дискурсивными иматериальными способностями субъекта (знание,твердое намерение и физическая сила) и определен-ной метаморфической спонтанностью/содействием,которое переживается как дар Другого (милость).Таким образом, обращаясь к Г̣аза̄лӣ, эта статья при-зывает к серьезному рассмотрению концепции ми-лости для понимания этической агентности висламской антропологии.«[Благочестивые предки] знали, что намерение – этоне то, что человек произносит своим языком, когдаизрекает: «Я намереваюсь». Скорее, это истечение всердце разливающегося потока божьих откровений,[истечение], которое иногда происходит с легкостью,а иногда с трудом».- Х̣уджжат ал-Ислам̄ Абӯ Ха̣ м̄ ид ал-Г̣аза̄лӣ
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/3796	ГОШИ, ЭМИЛИ	На Западе ученых нет: салафитские сети передачи знаний от Саудовской Аравии до Филадельфии	2025-06-05	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 39 No. 1--2 (2022): АМЕРИКАНСКИЙ ЖУРНАЛ ИСЛАМА И ОБЩЕСТВА; 50-80	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v39i1--2.3796	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/3796/2798	Получение знаний от ученых – первоочереднаяобязанность для салафитов. Но что это означает длясалафитов на Западе, которые отрицают наличиеученых среди них? С 1960-х годов западные мусуль-мане получают стипендии по программам ислам-ских исследований в Саудовской Аравии. Не исся-кает поток студентов, которые отправляются за зна-ниями к ведущим салафитским ученым в самомсердце мусульманского мира, и возвращаются до-мой, чтобы распространять салафитское учение ируководить своими общинами. Почему никто изэтих бывших студентов не считается ученым? Еслиони не ученые, в чем заключается их роль какместных лидеров? Ответить на эти вопросы поможетнастоящее исследование салафитского сообщества вФиладельфии, состоящего преимущественно изафроамериканцев. Приведенные здесь аргументывносят вклад в растущий корпус литературы поглобальному салафизму и, в частности, в исследова-ния так называемых мадхалитских общин, связан-ных с Исламским университетом Медины. Первич-ные полевые исследования с 2010 по 2013 год иинтервью, проведенные совсем недавно, в 2021 году,позволяют сделать вывод о том, что модель передачизнаний этого сообщества закрепляет и даже одобряетпостоянную зависимость салафитов Филадельфии отученых за рубежом.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/3798	КИЛИЙАМАННИЛ, ТАХИР ДЖАМАЛ	Развитие этики справедливости: Маудуди и Молодежное движение «Солидарность»	2025-06-05	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 39 No. 1--2 (2022): АМЕРИКАНСКИЙ ЖУРНАЛ ИСЛАМА И ОБЩЕСТВА; 12-49	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v39i1--2.3798	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/3798/2797	Новые мусульманские движения в Южной Индии,такие как Молодежное движение «Солидарность»,пересмотрели мусульманские приоритеты в отноше-нии прав человека, демократии, развития, эколо-гической активности и меньшинств. Я считаю, чтоМолодежное движение «Солидарность» предлагаетэтику исламской концепции справедливости, в то жевремя черпая вдохновение у влиятельного исламистаАбул А‘ла Маудуди. Сосредоточив внимание наюридических дебатах, я рассматриваю, как вмеша-тельство Маудуди влияет на практическую деятель-ность Молодежного движения «Солидарность». Вданной статье делается попытка рассмотреть ихактивность как пример юридических дискуссий,связанных с возрождением мак̣а̄с̣ид аш-шарӣ‘а вовторой половине XX века. Я предлагаю понимать ихмак̣а̄с̣ид-подход, рожденный из практики в контекстемусульманского меньшинства, как потенциальноспособствующий развитию фик̣х ал-ак̣аллийа.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/3799	ЛАХЕР, СУХЕЙЛ	Салафизм и традиционализм: авторитет ученых в современном исламе: Кембридж: издательство Кембриджского университета, 2021. 256 страниц (ЭМАД ХАМДЕ)	2025-06-05	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 39 No. 1--2 (2022): АМЕРИКАНСКИЙ ЖУРНАЛ ИСЛАМА И ОБЩЕСТВА; 158-171	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v39i1--2.3799	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/3799/2800	Книга «Салафизм и традиционализм: авторитет ученых всовременном исламе» Эмада Хамде представляет собой скру-пулезное исследование современного диспута о легитимностиученых между салафитским ученым-хадисоведом На̄с̣ир ад-Дӣном аль-Алба̄нӣ и его традиционными суннитскими собе-седниками. Основное внимание в ней уделяется полемике охадисах и об исламском праве (фик̣х). Эта книга стала долго-жданным дополнением к современным исследованиям сала-физма, которые (как замечает автор) часто сосредоточены наполитических аспектах движения в ущерб религиознымэлементам — хотя последнее, возможно, имеет большее зна-чение. Ведь большинство салафитов рассматривают своюдеятельность как в первую очередь религиозную, и не обяза-тельно политическую.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/379	Razali, Siti Salwani	The Invitation to Treat and Mu`atah in Online Contracts	2009-04-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 26 No. 2 (2009): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 79-101	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v26i2.379	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/379/2128	When dealing with an offer, it is crucial to determine whether a “statement” amounts to an “offer” or a mere “invitation to treat.” Even though “offer” and “acceptance” are among the basic elements of any binding contract, both [English] common law and Islamic law have their own views on what constitutes an invitation to treat. This paper focuses on the invitation to treat and mu`atah as specified in Islamic law. The following points will be discussed: (1) how the invitation to treat can be considered a valid contract, although common law has ruled it invalid because a mere invitation to treat does not constitute an offer; (2) a comparison of their differences in the context of online or cyber transactions. Several Qur’anic verses, hadiths, and opinions from Muslim and non-Muslim scholars will be presented, and specific cases will be referenced; and (3) providing a better understanding of both principles and an analysis of some critical issues, especially with regard to the invitation to treat.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/3800	АБУБАКАР, ИСМАИЛ ХАШИМ	Исламская мысль в Африке: собрание сочинений Афы Аджуры (1910-2004) и влияние аджураизма на Северную Гану: АЛХАДЖИ ЙУС УФ САЛИХУ АДЖУРА (АФА АДЖУРА ) - ЗАКЙИ И БРАХИМ (ПЕР.)	2025-06-05	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 39 No. 1--2 (2022): АМЕРИКАНСКИЙ ЖУРНАЛ ИСЛАМА И ОБЩЕСТВА; 172-183	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v39i1--2.3800	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/3800/2801	none
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/3801	ХЭ, МАРТИН ЦЗЯЦЗЮНЬ	Репрезентация ислама: хип-хоп поколения 11 сентября: Блумингтон: издательство Университета Индианы, 2020. XII+206 страниц. (КАМАЛ УДИН МОХАМЕД НАСИР)	2025-06-05	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 39 No. 1--2 (2022): АМЕРИКАНСКИЙ ЖУРНАЛ ИСЛАМА И ОБЩЕСТВА; 192-196	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v39i1--2.3801	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/3801/2803	none
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/3802	ДЖЕБЕДЖИ, АЛИ	Арабские завоевания и ранняя исламская историография: Футух аль-Булдан аль-Балазури: Лондон: издательство I.B. TAURIS, 2020. 272 страниц. (РАЙАН ЛИНЧ)	2025-06-05	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 39 No. 1--2 (2022): АМЕРИКАНСКИЙ ЖУРНАЛ ИСЛАМА И ОБЩЕСТВА; 197-201	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v39i1--2.3802	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/3802/2804	none
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/3803	ДУГАН, МАКС ДЖОНСОН	Чудеса и материальная жизнь: рис, руда, капканы и оружие в исламской Малайе: Кембридж: издательство Кембриджского университета, 2020. 290 страниц. (ТЕРЕН СЕВЕА)	2025-06-05	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 39 No. 1--2 (2022): АМЕРИКАНСКИЙ ЖУРНАЛ ИСЛАМА И ОБЩЕСТВА; 186-191	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v39i1--2.3803	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/3803/2802	none
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/3804	РОТМАН, АБДАЛЛАХ; АХМЕД, АЛИША; АВААД, РАНИЯ	Вклад и влияние Малика Бадри. Отец современной исламской психологии	2025-06-05	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 39 No. 1--2 (2022): АМЕРИКАНСКИЙ ЖУРНАЛ ИСЛАМА И ОБЩЕСТВА; 204-227	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v39i1--2.3804	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/3804/2805	none
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/381	Kaba, Amadu Jacky	The Numerical Distribution of Muslims in Africa	2009-07-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 26 No. 3 (2009): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 1-23	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v26i3.381	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/381/2118	This quantitative research study shows the numbers and percentages of Muslims in Africa, relative to Christians and Africans who continue to practice their traditional religions, within the continent’s five regions (viz., Eastern, Middle, Northern, Southern, and Western), as of July 2009. It also presents religious breakdowns for those nations that are currently or at one time were partly or fully colonized by European powers. The statistics show that Islam and Christianity combined have converted over 80 percent of all Africans and that the proportion of Africans on the continent who practice traditional or indigenous religions has now declined to less than 12 percent.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/382	Anyanwu, Ogechi	Enforcing the Shari`ah in Nigeria: Women, Justice, and the Muslims’ Collective Conscience	2009-07-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 26 No. 3 (2009): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 24-40	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v26i3.382	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/382/2119	The reemergence of the Shari`ah in northern Nigeria in 2000 is reshaping the Muslims’ criminal justice system in unintended ways. This article accounts for and provides fresh insights on how the fate of Muslim women under the Shari`ah intertwines with the uncertain future of the law in Nigeria. Using Emile Durkheim’s theory of conscience collective as an explanatory framework of analysis, I argue that the well-placed objective of using the Shari` ah to reaffirm or create social solidarity among Muslim Nigerians has been undermined by the unequal, harsher punishments and suppression of human rights perpetrated against Muslim women since 2000. A I show, not only does such discrimination violate the principle of natural justice upheld by Islam, but it also threatens to shrink, if not wipe out, the collective conscience of Nigerian Muslims that the law originally sought to advance.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/383	Mazrui, Ali M.	Shariacracy and Federal Models in the Era of Globalization: Nigeria in a Comparative Perspective	2009-07-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 26 No. 3 (2009): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 41-55	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v26i3.383	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/383/2120	Nigeria has Africa’s largest concentration of Muslims and the world’s largest concentration of black Muslims. As the twenty first century began to unfold, more Muslim states in the Nigerian federation adopted some version of Islamic law, although the country as a whole is supposed to be secularist. The Shari`ah in northern Nigeria, which became a passionate protest against the political and economic marginalization of northern Muslims, is also sometimes a form of cultural resistance to western education and the wider forces of globalization. One systemic problem posed by shariacracy as a mode of governance is whether a federal system can accommodate theocracy at the state level and still be a secular state at a federal level. Nigeria has a religious form of asymmetrical federalism that contrasts with the linguistic form of asymmetrical federalism successfully practiced in Switzerland.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/384	Haron, Muhammed	Emerging and Challenging Voices in the House of Islam: South Africa’s “African” Muslims	2009-07-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 26 No. 3 (2009): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 56-85	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v26i3.384	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/384/2121	South African Islam has always been associated with the Cape Malay and Indian communities throughout the twentieth century. As a consequence, Islam as a religious tradition was seldom associated with other ethnic groups. Toward the end of apartheid and during the era of democracy there has been tangible evidence of its growth among African ethnic communities. This essay, which looks at this phenomenon from roughly 1961-2001, reflects upon South African Muslims’ demographics with special focus on the African Muslim communities and analyzes the position of African Muslims alongside their coreligionists by concentrating on randomly selected case studies. I seek to demonstrate how certain representatives from the selected communities, via internal developments and external influences, have had significant input in terms of changing the face of Islam in southern Africa. The essay is prefaced by a theoretical frame designed to assist in understanding the development of an African Muslim identity and the emergence of an African Muslim community.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/385	Hassen, Mohammed	Islam as an Ideology of Resistance among the Oromo of Ethiopia	2009-07-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 26 No. 3 (2009): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 86-109	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v26i3.385	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/385/2122	Before I embark on the main subject, three caveats are in order. First, this article deals with two themes that are indirectly related, but necessary, to understanding why the Oromo, who have had contact with Islam since at least the fourteenth century, embraced it mainly during the nineteenth century. Notwithstanding their recent conversion, today the Oromo are the single largest Muslim community in Ethiopia. The article will explore their rapid conversion during the second half of the nineteenth century in conjunction with Emperor Menilek II’s conquest and occupation of their land and its impact upon every aspect of their existence. Second, in this paper I have heavily drawn on a paper I presented at a conference held at the University of Edinburgh in 1999 and another one published in 1992. Third, the paper is divided into seven unequal parts, preceded by a short introduction.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/3869	Анджум, Овамир	Вступление редактора	2025-10-20	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 39 No. 3--4 (2022): АМЕРИКАНСКИЙ ЖУРНАЛ ИСЛАМА И ОБЩЕСТВА; 7-9	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v39i3--4.3869	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/3869/2818	Хочу начать с поздравления моих коллег, возглавляющих «Аме-риканский журнал об исламе и обществе» (АЖИО), а также чита-телей и авторов с тем, что журнал наконец стал индексируемымв SCOPUS. Будучи журналом, находящимся в постоянном обра-щении у читателей с момента своего основания в 1984 году,АЖИО в настоящее время представляет собой междисципли-нарное издание в открытом доступе, выходящее два раза в год,статьи для которого проходят двойное слепое рецензирование ипосвящены глобальным проблемам. Этот недавно обретенныйофициальный статус говорит о неизменно высоких стандартахисследований, приглашая еще более широкую аудиторию начи-нающих и именитых ученых публиковать свои лучшие работы вразличных областях изучения исламской мысли и общества.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/386	Sounaye, Abdoulaye	Speaking for Islam: Ulama, Laïcité, and Democratization in Niger	2009-07-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 26 No. 3 (2009): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 110-127	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v26i3.386	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/386/2124	Unexpectedly, one of the marking features of democratization in Niger has been the rise of a variety of Islamic discourses. They focus on the separation between religion and the state and, more precisely, the way it is manifested through the French model of laïcité, which democratization has adopted in Niger. For many Muslim actors, laïcité amounts to a marginalization of Islamic values and a negation of Islam. This article present three voices: the Collaborators, the Moderates, and the Despisers. Each represents a trend that seeks to influence the state’s political and ideological makeup. Although the ulama in general remain critical vis-à-vis the state’s political and institutional transformation, not all of them reject the principle of the separation between religion and state. The Collaborators suggest cooperation between the religious authority and the political one, the Moderates insist on the necessity for governance to accommodate the people’s will and visions, and the Despisers reject the underpinning liberalism that voids religious authority and demand a total re-Islamization. I argue that what is at stake here is less the separation between state and religion than the modality of this separation and its impact on religious authority. The targets, tones, and justifications of the discourses I explore are evidence of the limitations of a democratization project grounded in laïcité. Thus in place of a secular democratization, they propose a conservative democracy based on Islam and its demands for the realization of the common good.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/3871	Алкатири, Варда	Как насчет «Зеленого халифата»? Глобальное исламское управление экологией для правоверных мусульманских обществ	2025-10-20	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 39 No. 3--4 (2022): АМЕРИКАНСКИЙ ЖУРНАЛ ИСЛАМА И ОБЩЕСТВА; 11-64	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v39i3--4.3871	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/3871/2819	За более чем пятьдесят лет международных перего-воров по окружающей среде, начиная с первой кон-ференции ООН по окружающей среде в 1972 году вСтокгольме и заканчивая конференцией COP27 поизменению климата в Шарм-эль-Шейхе в 2022 году, основные экологические проблемы нашего временитак и не смогли найти своего решения. Переговорыпо-прежнему оставались событиями второго плана.Учитывая приверженность национальных госу-дарств экономическому развитию и суверенитету,возникновение тупиковых ситуаций вполне понят-но. В таком контексте в данной статье предлагаетсярассмотреть «Зеленый халифат» как глобальноеуправление окружающей средой, основанное на ве-ре, для сообщества шариатских стран и правоверныхместных мусульманских общин по всему миру. Встатье предлагается ряд обоснований для рассмотре-ния идеи Зеленого халифата в свете чрезвычайнойклиматической ситуации с разных точек зрения: со-циальной справедливости, обмена знаниями и куль-турной трансформации. Опираясь на книгу Шумахе-ра «Малое прекрасно» и работу Овамира Анджума«Кто за халифат?», данная статья раскрывает кон-цепцию социально и экологически ответственногокорпоративного управления, которая может соответ-ствовать стремлению Шумахера к «Четвертому ми-ру», где правительство и экономика находятся подподлинным контролем человека, поскольку размерытаких подразделений невелики, разумны и соответ-ствуют человеческому масштабу, а темпы развитиятам соответствуют религиозной космологии, к кото-рой их члены должны адаптироваться. Зеленый ха-лифат предугадывается на деколониальном горизон-те плюриверсальности в направлении многополяр-ного мирового порядка.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/3872	аль-Дагистани, Сами	За рамками мас̣лах̣а: адаб и исламская экономическая мысль	2025-10-20	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 39 No. 3--4 (2022): АМЕРИКАНСКИЙ ЖУРНАЛ ИСЛАМА И ОБЩЕСТВА; 98-124	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v39i3--4.3872	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/3872/2821	В данной статье основное внимание уделяетсямас̣лах̣а (выгоде или благополучию) и адаб (правед-ному поведению или характеру) как этически взаи-мосвязанным понятиям, которые обсуждаютсяклассическими мусульманскими учеными в связи сприобретением богатства (касб) и экономическойактивностью в целом. В частности, в некоторых ра-ботах аш-Шайбани (ум. 805), аль-Мухасиби (ум. 857),Ибн Аби ад-Дунья (ум. 894), аль-Маварди (ум.1058) иаль-Газали (ум. 1111) личное благочестие тесно свя-зано с праведностью экономического поведенияпод знаменем моральных предписаний адаб. В све-те понимания аль-Газали экономического обеспе-чения как части его общей теории вечного счастья(са‘а̄да), концепция мас̣лах̣а может быть проанали-зирована в контексте адаб как расширение законовшариата. Хотя мас̣лах̣а с юридической точки зренияимеет решающее значение для защиты экономиче-ской деятельности и сохранения богатства, в своейстатье я рассматриваю мас̣лах̣а как производную отадаб и его целостного представления о человече-ской природе. В частности, я рассматриваю, чтопредставляет собой экономическое обеспечение какэтическое начинание в избранных классическихтекстах; а также то, как концепция адаб сохраняет иулучшает экономическое поведение в пониманииклассических мусульманских ученых.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/3873	Вахб, Юсеф Али	Конкуренция властей: исламское семейное право и квазисудебное разбирательство в Северной Америке	2025-10-20	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 39 No. 3--4 (2022): АМЕРИКАНСКИЙ ЖУРНАЛ ИСЛАМА И ОБЩЕСТВА; 125-157	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v39i3--4.3873	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/3873/2822	Мусульмане в Северной Америке, стремясь разре-шить свои частные споры, сталкиваются с многогран-ными проблемами доступа к правосудию. Посколькуисламские законы о браке и разводе не всегда соот-ветствуют североамериканским семейным законода-тельным практикам, мусульманам приходится одно-временно пытаться выполнять свои обязательства пе-ред обеими правовыми системами. В отличие от свет-ского права, исламский бракоразводный процесс тре-бует либо окончательного согласия мужа, либо при-сутствия судьи-мусульманина. Они также предусмат- ривают существенные материальные обязательства иправа разведенных лиц, сопоставимые с соответству-ющими гарантиями (corollary relief — опека и под-держка детей в процессе развода), предусмотреннымизаконами о семейном праве. Отсутствие религиозныхквазисудебных процедур разрешения споров создаетпрепятствия для получения мусульманами религиоз-ного развода или аннулирования брака, а также дляпоследующих мер правовой защиты, такой как фи-нансовое урегулирование [отступные] и опека, в соот-ветствии с их религиозными убеждениями. Чтобыразрешить проблему, связанную с этими накладыва-ющимися друг на друга барьерами, в данной статьеанализируются формы исламских юридических пол-номочий по разрешению религиозного развода илианнулирования брака, а также по посредничеству илиарбитражному урегулированию соответствующих га-рантий с использованием религиозного права. В за-ключение в статье даются рекомендации по созданиюцелостной системы разрешения семейных споров всоответствии с исламским правом и юридическиосуществимым образом.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/3875	Хан, Табинна М.	Проблемы изучения исламистских группировок в американской политологии	2025-10-20	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 39 No. 3--4 (2022): АМЕРИКАНСКИЙ ЖУРНАЛ ИСЛАМА И ОБЩЕСТВА; 65-97	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v39i3--4.3875	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/3875/2820	В настоящей статье я объясняю, почему отсутствиедискуссий между политической теорией и сравни-тельной политологией привело к недостаточномупониманию политики традиционными исламскимиучеными и исламистами в американской политиче-ской науке. В первом разделе я анализирую влияниетекстового подхода в политической теории; во вто-ром — либеральных рамок сравнительной политоло-гии; и в-третьем, многообещающее новое направле- ние: междисциплинарную область исламских право-вых исследований, которая имеет потенциал пре-одолеть разрыв между политологическими, юриди-ческими и региональными подходами в изучениимусульманских сообществ. Я утверждаю, что опораполитических теоретиков на основополагающие ис-ламистские тексты, а не на интерпретацию текстов входе юридических и политических процессов, огра-ничивает их способность представлять эволюциюпрагматической исламистской теории в таких стра-нах, как Пакистан. Более того, в то время как полити-ческие теоретики, такие как Лукас Суэйн, продемон-стрировали тщетность применения либеральныхпредположений к теократам, компаративисты про-должают преимущественно полагаться на либераль-ные категории и концепции, что создает искаженноепредставление об исламистах. Разделение трудамежду политической теорией и сравнительной по-литологией, а также вытекающее из этого отсутствиедискуссий затрудняют — если не делают невозмож-ным — справедливое представление и анализ совре-менных исламистских групп в американской поли-тической науке.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/3876	Садриу, Бехар	Ислам, авторитаризм и отсталость: глобальное и историческое сравнение: (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. —316 p.) by АХМЕТ КУРУ (AHMET KURU )	2025-10-20	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 39 No. 3--4 (2022): АМЕРИКАНСКИЙ ЖУРНАЛ ИСЛАМА И ОБЩЕСТВА; 160-197	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v39i3--4.3876	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/3876/2824	В 2019 году профессор Ахмет Куру опубликовал свою нашу-мевшую книгу «Ислам, авторитаризм и отсталость: глобаль-ное и историческое сравнение». Я использую слово «нашумев-шую» не в знак одобрения, а лишь для того, чтобы указать наполученные ею награды, среди которых совместно присуждае-мая Американской ассоциацией политических наук престиж-ная книжная премия имени Джервиса-Шредера за 2020 год. Бо-лее того, Куру и издатели активно продвигали книгу посред-ством мирового книжного тура, включая остановку в Гарварде,а также благодаря рецензиям в Foreign Affairs и многочислен-ных журналах по политологии и истории. Совсем недавно егоаргументы были представлены в широко освещаемой статьебывшего премьер-министра Великобритании Тони Блэра,написанной после повторного завоевания Афганистана тали-бами, где он характерно осуждает «исламизм» как «угрозу пер-вого порядка для безопасности Запада».
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/3877	Амаша , Мухаммад	Соперничество в Персидском заливе: Юсуф аль-Карадави, Абдулла бен Байя и спор Катара и ОАЭ из-за «арабской весны» и кризиса в Персидском заливе : Milton: Routledge, 2021. —136 р. by ДЭВИД Х . УОРРЕН (DAVID H . WARREN)	2025-10-20	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 39 No. 3--4 (2022): АМЕРИКАНСКИЙ ЖУРНАЛ ИСЛАМА И ОБЩЕСТВА; 200-204	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v39i3--4.3877	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/3877/2823	Дэвид Х. Уоррен вносит существенный вклад в растущий кор-пус литературы об улемах и «арабской весне» своей первойкнигой, в которой дается обзор истории отношений Юсуфа аль-Карадави и Абдуллы бен Байи с Катаром и ОАЭ соответствен-но; взаимодействия как улемов, так и государств с процессами«арабской весной»; и представляется обзор политической мыс-ли улемов и ее связь с внешней политикой обоих государств.После описания структуры книги, я расскажу о ее методологиии основных аргументах. Затем я проанализирую некоторые изее аргументов с точки зрения методологии и сделаю вывод отом, почему данная книга является хорошим образцом научно-го подхода в изучении улемов.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/3878	Урбан , Элизабет	«Жемчужное дерево»: небывалое покровительство архитектуре египетской царицы-рабыни XIII века Шаджар ад-Дурр: Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. —204 р. Д. Фэйрчайлд Рагглз ( D. FAIRCHILD RUGGLES)	2025-10-20	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 39 No. 3--4 (2022): АМЕРИКАНСКИЙ ЖУРНАЛ ИСЛАМА И ОБЩЕСТВА; 205-209	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v39i3--4.3878	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/3878/2825	Почти любой обзор средневековой исламской истории включа-ет фигуру Шаджар ад-Дурр (в переводе с арабского «Жемчуж-ное дерево»), которая была одной из немногих женщин в ис-ламской истории, носивших титул султана, и единственной,кто начинал свою жизнь как рабыня. Она также известна какключевая фигура в египетской политике, поскольку ознамено-вала собой переход от династии Айюбидов Саладина (1171–1250гг. н. э.) к Мамлюкскому султанату (1250–1517 гг. н. э.). Однакоработы, анализирующие биографию, правление и влияниеШаджар ад-Дурр, часто упускают из виду ее роль как новаторав области архитектуры. В книге «Жемчужное дерево» историкискусства Д. Фэйрчайлд Рагглз (D. Fairchild Ruggles) подчерки-вает архитектурное новаторство Шаджар ад-Дурр и утверждает,что ее «покровительство архитектуре… изменило облик Каираи оказало длительное влияние на исламскую архитектуру» (р.1). В книге основное внимание уделяется двум зданиям: мавзо-лею ас-Салиха, мужа Шаджар ад-Дурр, и собственному мавзо-лею Шаджар ад-Дурр. Рагглз утверждает, что в архитектуре мавзолея ас-Салиха Шаджар ад-Дурр положила начало тенден-ции мамлюкской эпохи размещать купольные мавзолеи в го-родском пространстве на видном месте и пристраивать их ккомплексу медресе. В собственном мавзолее Шаджар ад-Дуррвпервые в Египте использовала золотую мозаику в дамасскомстиле — этот прием часто приписывают более позднему мам-люкскому султану Калауну. Шаджар ад-Дурр эффектно исполь-зовала эту золотую мозаику, чтобы представить себя — жем-чужное дерево — в михрабе, таким образом, используя такуюархитектуру для «смелого представления личной идентично-сти» (р. 139). Рагглз щедро иллюстрирует свои доводы цветны-ми фотографиями и другими изображениями, а конечный ре-зультат представляет собой наглядное представление о карьереШаджар ад-Дурр и особенно о ее мастерстве владения симво-лическим языком общественной архитектуры.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/3879	Хан, Камран Ахмад	Коран в Южной Азии: герменевтика, коранические проекты и представления об исламской традиции в Британской Индии: London: Routledge, 2022. —288 р. Камран Башир (KAMRAN BASHIR)	2025-10-20	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 39 No. 3--4 (2022): АМЕРИКАНСКИЙ ЖУРНАЛ ИСЛАМА И ОБЩЕСТВА; 210-214	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v39i3--4.3879	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/3879/2826	Книга Камрана Башира «Коран в Южной Азии» рассматриваетвопрос о том, как мусульмане-сунниты в Индии относились ксвоему интеллектуальному наследию и как они отождествлялисебя со своими прошлыми традициями на фоне европейскогоколониализма и миссионерской деятельности. Автор уделяетосновное внимание таким мусульманским ученым, как СайидАхмад Хан (ум. 1898), Ашраф Али Танави (ум. 1943) и Хамид ад-Дин Фарахи (ум. 1930), много писавшим о различных подходахк пониманию Корана после мятежа/восстания, произошедшегов 1857 году, и раздела Индии в 1947 году.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/387	Solihu, Abdul Kabir Hussain	Semantics of the Qur’anic Weltanschauung: A Critical Analysis of Toshihiko Izutsu’s Works	2009-10-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 26 No. 4 (2009): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 1-23	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v26i4.387	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/387/2110	This paper examines the structural semantic approach based on the theory of linguistic relativity to scriptural language as exemplified in Toshihiko Izutsu’s studies of the Qur’anic weltanschauung. According to this theory, each language contains a particular worldview that causes its speakers to view the world in a way different from the speakers of other languages. By an analytical study of the semantic fields and contextual use of the Qur’an’s key conceptual terms, Izutsu explores the semantic factors believed to have been employed by the Qur’an in its Islamization of the jahili (pre-Islamic Arab) worldview. Such an approach exhibits that the Qur’an’s linguistic vision of reality is internally coherent but culturally and historically conditioned. Following a textual analysis, this study critically examines, from both an ethical and a theological perspective, the semantic theory that Izutsu applies to the Qur’an’s key concepts in his two works: God and Man in the Qur’an and Ethico-Religious Concepts in the Qur’an. The objective is to investigate the extent to which semantic analysis could enrich our understanding of the ontological problems raised in the Qur’an.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/3880	Дуган, Макс Джонсон	Покупая Будду, продавая Руми: ориентализм и рынок мистического : London: Oneworld, 2020. —320 р. София Роуз Арджана (SOPHIA ROSEARJANA )	2025-10-20	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 39 No. 3--4 (2022): АМЕРИКАНСКИЙ ЖУРНАЛ ИСЛАМА И ОБЩЕСТВА; 215-220	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v39i3--4.3880	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/3880/2827	В своем тематически и теоретически эклектичном проекте Со-фия Роуз Арджана анализирует, как религиозное потребитель-ство увековечивает ориентализм. Арджана фокусируется на по-требительских привычках нановцев1 и нью-эйджеров, двухаморфных групп, объединенных своим открытым пренебреже-нием к ограничениям, выдвигаемым религиозными традиция-ми. Она утверждает, что их одежда, направления путешествийи способы ухода за собой превращают «Восток» в товар для за-падных потребителей. Арджана называет рассматриваемуюсферу потребления «рынком мистического», сетью символов,фигур и предметов, которые распространяют нехристианскиерелигиозные традиции среди тех, кто отчаянно нуждается вволшебстве. В рамках рынка мистического туризм на Бали илипереводы Руми, лишенные исламского содержания (рр. 220-221), не являются, как может показаться, способами почерпнуть знания из других религиозных традиций. Напротив, рынокмистического в «Покупая Будду, продавая Руми» вытесняет ре-лигиозные символы и закрепляет ориентализм. В постскрип-туме Арджаны поясняется ее намерение разоблачить много-численные гегемонии — белизны, колониальности, протестант-ской нормативности, — которые структурируют эти формы по-требления. Ее увлекательные концепции и конкретные приме-ры делают именно это, причем в общедоступной форме.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/3881	Первез, Солат	Интеллектуальная история мусульман: обзор: СОЛАТ ПЕРВЕЗ (SAULAT PERVEZ)	2025-10-20	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 39 No. 3--4 (2022): АМЕРИКАНСКИЙ ЖУРНАЛ ИСЛАМА И ОБЩЕСТВА; 222-297	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v39i3--4.3881	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/3881/2828	В данной статье предпринята попытка описать ин-теллектуальную историю мусульман и трансциви-лизационную, дискурсивную традицию ислама,охватывающую четырнадцать столетий. В ней опи-сывается история научных проектов, формировав-ших исламскую мысль, которые начали развиватьсяпосле смерти Пророка (мир ему и благословениеАллаха) и активизировались в последующие столе- тия, несмотря на многочисленные перемены и не-спокойные времена, с которыми столкнулась му-сульманская умма. Вместе с прилагаемой к статьекартой и визуальной временной шкалой данная ра-бота призвана помочь студентам, изучающим ис-лам в целом и исламские науки в частности, оце-нить широту и глубину интеллектуальной историимусульман. Статья начинается с описания основа-ния ранних региональных центров, параллельногоформирования дисциплин, развития различныхправовых школ, а также многочисленных направ-лений исламской мысли и того, как они не тольковлияли друг на друга, но и являлись частью основ-ного течения ислама. Завершается статья обзоромвлияния современности на исламскую мысль. Янадеюсь, что благодаря данным усилиям студентысмогут развить элементарное понимание исламскойнауки в ее историческом контексте, установитьмеждисциплинарные связи, критически отнестись котдельным дисциплинам в своем целенаправлен-ном изучении и обрести всеобъемлющее глубокоепочтение к коллективному мусульманскому интел-лектуальному наследию, наработанному на протя-жении 1400 лет, а также к разнообразной научнойборьбе за то, чтобы прилежно чтить и соблюдатьпослание, полученное от Пророка Мухаммада (мирему и благословение Аллаха). Карта и хронология, прилагаемые к настоящему обзору истории мусульманской интеллектуальной мысли, доступны здесь. ОБНОВЛЕНИЕ: Автор также сотрудничал с южноафриканской газетой Muslim Views по проекту «Африканская мусульманская интеллектуальная история», в рамках которого была создана инфографика с приложением, включающим 30 дополнительных учёных.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/388	Dhaouadi, Mahmoud	The `Aql-Naql Theory of Human Symbols and the Making of Cultural Sociology	2009-10-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 26 No. 4 (2009): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 24-46	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v26i4.388	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/388/2111	This paper uses both reason (`aql) and Qur’an-based knowledge (naql) to establish my `Aql-Naql Theory of Human Symbols (ANTHS) and explain its relevance to the formulation of cultural sociology. In it, I argue that human individuals are by nature users of human symbols, based upon the following five observations/concepts: (1) the process of the human body’sgrowth and maturation is very slow when compared to that of other living beings; (2) humans have a longer lifespan than many other species; (3) the human race has a dominant role in running this world; (4) humans are distinct due to their use of human symbols (HS), which comprise spoken and written language, thought, religion, knowledge/science, laws, myths, cultural values and norms, and so on; and (5) human identity is made up of two parts, the physical body and human symbols, and is thus fully dualistic. This theory explains that human symbols (4) play a principal role in enabling humanity to occupy the central place in the world (3) as well as in the making of features 1, 2, and 5. The person’s slow bodily growth and maturation are explained by the fact that humanity’s global growth and maturation involve two fronts: those of the body and of human symbols. While the growth and maturation of non-human species is unidimensional (the body), those of their human counterparts are bidimensional (the body and human symbols. The human ability to think and reason (`aql) gives credit to human symbols’ centrality to the human identity. The Qur’an also stresses these symbols’ core importance for human identity. As a classical Islamic method, this essay will show that the use of `aql and naql in the process of knowledge making makes a major contribution to the development of cultural sociology.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/3893	Karić, Enes	KOPAH: A Serbian Translation of the Qur’ān by Mićo Ljubibratić	2025-11-10	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 42 No. 3-4 (2025): American Journal of Islam and Society; 180-205	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v42i3-4.3893	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/3893/2848	This essay examines the historical and social context surrounding Mihajlo Mića Ljubibratić’s first translation of the Qur’ān into Serbian, published in 1895 in Belgrade. The article explores the political and social factors influencing Ljubibratić’s decision to undertake this translation, as well as the reception of his work in both Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia. It also discusses subsequent editions and publications of the translation. Additionally, the essay analyzes the Russian and French sources used in the translation and provides commentary on Ljubibratić’s stylistic choices within their sociolinguistic context.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/3894	Warren, David H.	Editorial Note	2025-11-10	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 42 No. 3-4 (2025): American Journal of Islam and Society; 2-4	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v42i3-4.3894	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/3894/2834	This issue of the American Journal of Islam and Society comprises four research articles, which engage themes of development and change within the Islamic tradition alongside questions of Muslim identity. We begin with Abbas Jong’s work, “Reconfiguring Political Islam: A Discursive Tradition Approach.” In this article, Jong offers a thorough, deeply theoretical engagement with the concept of discursive tradition, which he restructures via the concept of social configuration. We then turn to a study by Malik Mufti, “The Catholic Experience in America from Orestes Brownson to the Bozells: A Precedent for Muslims?” Malik’s point of departure is to consider the history of American Catholicism and its adaptation to the “American creed,” a part of an American liberal culture “that is both formally tolerant and ideologically compelling” to immigrants and their religious traditions. As our third research article for this issue, we then have Hamdija Begovic’s “From Ummatic Muslims to State-centered Bosniacs: The Case of the Muslims of Bosnia.” Here, Begovic considers the evolution of the national identity of Bosnian Muslims throughout the 20th century from what he calls an “Ummatic-centric focus” that uses the label “Muslims,” toward a secularized identity demonstrated through their adoption of the ethnonym “Bosniacs.” The fourth and final research article in this issue is Bilkis Bharucha’s article, “Islam, Science, and the Environment: An Application of Ibrahim Kalin’s “Three Views of Science in the Islamic World,” which offers a critical application of Kalin’s framework to contemporary debates on Islam and environmental ethics.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/389	Raja, Masood Ashraf	Jihad in Islam: Colonial Encounter, the Neoliberal Order, and the Muslim Subject of Resistance	2009-10-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 26 No. 4 (2009): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 47-71	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v26i4.389	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/389/2112	Using classical and current definitions of jihad and theories of globalization and neoliberalism, this essay discusses jihad and current jihadist movements within their reactive and responsive relationships to the material conditions of the Islamic world in general and of Pakistan in particular. Written in response to the essentialist claims of American neoconservative scholars, it suggests that jihadist militancy is not inherently Islamic, but rather a product of the material political conditions created by the Muslim colonial experience and perpetuated by the destabilizing influence of power politics, neoliberal capital, and the failure of the national promise of the postcolonial Muslim nation-states.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/390	Chande, Abdin	A Critical Evaluation of Some Problematic Hadith Narratives	2009-10-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 26 No. 4 (2009): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 72-102	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v26i4.390	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/390/2114	This study examines some issues critical to understanding the hadith literature in the modern context. It argues that this literature, despite its widely accepted status as a foundational source of Islam second in importance only to the Qur’an, continues to be a subject of controversy in some Muslim and non-Muslim quarters. This article brings together a small sample of problematic hadith narratives for the purpose of critically evaluating them according to certain criteria. This will be the basis for passing judgment over these pre-selected hadith that are, for instance, textually incompatible with the purport of the Qur’an.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/3931	Baktemur, Hatice Kübra	Editörün Notu	2025-10-23	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 39 No. 1 (2022): İSLAM ve TOPLUM ARAŞTIRMALARI DERGİSİ, AMERİKA; 9-10	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v39i1.3931	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/3931/2829	American Journal of Islam and Society (AJIS) dergisinde 2022 yılında yayımlanan makalelerden derlenen bu sayı, İslam düşüncesi ile toplum ilişkisine dair özgün katkılar sunan üç makale ve bir anma yazısından oluşan bir seçkidir. Bu sayıda yer alan her bir makale, İslam’ın çağdaş toplumsal meselelerle kurduğu ilişkiyi farklı bir boyutta ele almakta; ekonomi, ahlak, hukuk ve otorite gibi temel konulara dair derinlikli analizler sunmaktadır. Bu çeviri seçkisi, AJIS’in hem içerik çeşitliliğini hem de düşünsel derinliğini Türk okuyucusuyla buluşturmayı amaçlamakta; aynı zamanda güncel meselelerle kurulan bağlar sayesinde bu alanlardaki entelektüel tartışmalara katkı sunmayı hedeflemektedir.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/3932	Al-Daghistani, Sami	Maslahatın Ötesinde: Edeb ve İslam İktisat Düşüncesi	2025-10-23	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 39 No. 1 (2022): İSLAM ve TOPLUM ARAŞTIRMALARI DERGİSİ, AMERİKA; 11-35	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v39i1.3932	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/3932/2830	Bu makale maslahat (fayda veya iyi-oluş) ve edeb (erdemli davranış veya karakter) kavramlarını servet edinme (kesb) ve genel ekonomik uğraşlarla ilgili olarak klasik Müslüman âlimler tarafından tartışılan ve ahlak felsefesinin iç içe geçmiş kavramları olarak ele alır. Bireysel dindarlık, özellikle Şeybânî (ö. 805), Muhâsibî (ö. 857), İbn Ebü’d-Dünyâ (ö. 894), Mâverdî (ö. 1058) ve Gazzâlî’nin (ö. 1111) bazı eserlerinde, edebin ahlaki şartları başlığı altında erdemli iktisadi davranışla yakından ilişkilendirilmiştir. Gazzâlî’nin ekonomik geçimi sağlamayı nihai mutluluk (sa‘âdet) teorisinin bir parçası olarak algıladığı göz önüne alınırsa, maslahat kavramı şeriatın bir uzantısı olan edeb kavramı bağlamında incelenebilir. Hukuki açıdan maslahat, ekonomik faaliyetlerin ve mülkün korunmasında hayati bir öneme sahip olsa da bu makalede ben maslahatı aynı zamanda edeb kavramı ve bu kavramın insan doğasına ilişkin bütüncül yorumunun bir ürünü olarak ele alıyorum. Özellikle seçilen metinlere göre ekonomik geçimi sağlamayı ahlaki bir uğraş kılan şeylerin ne olduğuna ve klasik Müslüman âlimler tarafından anlaşıldığı şekliyle edeb kavramının iktisadi davranışı nasıl koruduğu ve geliştirdiğine işaret ediyorum.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/3933	Mian, Ali Altaf	İnayetin Failleri: Gazzâlî ve İslam Antropolojisi Arasında Ahlaki Faillik	2025-10-23	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 39 No. 1 (2022): İSLAM ve TOPLUM ARAŞTIRMALARI DERGİSİ, AMERİKA; 37-66	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v39i1.3933	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/3933/2831	Bu makale Orta Çağ ahlak teologlarından biri olan Ebû Hâmid el-Gazzâlî’ye (1058-1111) başvurarak İslam antropolojisinde ahlaki failliğin kuramlaştırılmasına katkıda bulunur. Talal Asad’in Gazzâlî ile ilişkisini temel alan makale Gazzâlî’nin yönelimsellik (niyetlilik) hakkındaki yazılarını yakından inceleyerek ahlaki faillik teorisine ışık tutar. Gazzâlî ahlaki failliğe ilişkin idealist bir teori geliştirmediği gibi ahlaki öznenin eylemlerinin “belirli türde davranışları bilinçsiz bir şekilde veya düşünmeden gerçekleştirmeye yönelik” olduğunu da ileri sürmez (Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 139). Bundan ziyade ahlaki failliği, olumsal ve ikircikli bir alan olarak ifade eder. Çünkü eylem hem bilgiyi, kastı/iradeyi ve bedensel kapasiteyi hem de ilahi inayeti içerir. Bu makaleye göre inayet ahlaki öznenin bağımsız olmadığının göstergesidir. Nitekim Gazzâlî failliği, bir yanda öznenin natık ve maddi kapasiteleri (bilgi, kasıt ve bedensel kuvvet) diğer yanda Öteki’nin bir lütfu (inayet) olarak deneyimlenen belirli bir metamorfik kendiliğindenlik/etkinleşme olacak şekilde ikiye ayırır.Dolayısıyla, Gazzâlî’ye başvuran bu makale İslam antropolojisindeki ahlaki faillik meselesinin anlaşılması için inayet kavramıyla ciddi biçimde ilgilenilmesini önerir. “[Dini bütün atalarımız] niyetin bir kişinin “niyet ediyorum” derkendiliyle telaffuz ettiği şey olmadığını biliyorlardı. Aksine niyetAllah’tan gelen açılımların kalbe yayılarak onu diriltmesidir, [bu diriliş]bazen kolay bazen zor meydana gelir.”- Hüccetü’l-İslâm Ebû Hâmid el-Gazzâlî
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/3934	Wahb, Yousef Aly	Rekabet Hâlindeki Yetkililer: Kuzey Amerika’da İslami Aile Hukuku ve Yarı-Yargısal Süreçler	2025-10-23	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 39 No. 1 (2022): İSLAM ve TOPLUM ARAŞTIRMALARI DERGİSİ, AMERİKA; 67-87	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v39i1.3934	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/3934/2832	Özel anlaşmazlıklarını çözmek isteyen Kuzey Amerikalı Müslümanlar adalete erişim konusunda çok yönlü sorunlarla karşı karşıya kalmaktadır. İslami evlilik ve boşanma yasaları her zaman Kuzey Amerika aile kanunu sistemiyle uyumlu olmadığından, Müslümanlar her iki yasal sisteme karşı yükümlülüklerini aynı anda yerine getirmeye çalışmanın zorluğunu yaşamaktadırlar. Seküler hukukun aksine İslami boşanma işlemleri kocanın nihai rızasının veya Müslüman bir hâkimin (kadı’nın) bulunmasını gerektirir. Ayrıca, boşananlar için aile hukuku kanunları tarafından sağlanan ek yardımlara benzeyen maddi yükümlülükler ve haklar belirler. İhtilafların çözümünde yarı-yargısal dinî süreçlerin olmaması Müslümanların dinî inançlarına uygun bir boşanma veya fesih kararı elde edebilmelerine, mali uzlaşmalar ve velayet gibi müteakip destekler edinebilmelerine engel olmaktadır. Bu makale, birbiriyle örtüşen bu engellere yanıt vermek amacıyla, dinî boşanma, fesih kararı verme ve ek yardım konusunda dinî hukuku kullanarak arabuluculuk veya hakemlik yapan İslam fıkhına uygun yetki biçimlerini incelemektedir. Çalışma, aile içi anlaşmazlıkların İslam hukukuna uygun ve yasal olarak uygulanabilir bir şekilde çözülmesi için bütüncül bir çerçeveye yönelik tavsiyelerle son bulmaktadır.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/3935	Rothman, Abdallah; Ahmed, Alisha; Awaad, Rania	Malik Bedri’nin Katkıları ve Etkisi: Modern İslami Psikolojinin Babası	2025-10-23	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 39 No. 1 (2022): İSLAM ve TOPLUM ARAŞTIRMALARI DERGİSİ, AMERİKA; 89-109	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v39i1.3935	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/3935/2833	Fikirlerin ve ilkelerin baş döndürücü bir hızda sorgulandığı, incelendiği ve yarıştırıldığı bir çağda yaşıyoruz. Makul ve ispat edilmiş olanı varsayımlardan ve beyanlardan ayırmak oldukça zor olabiliyor. Birbirinden kopuk fikirler ve bilgiler, bir aktarım zinciri gerekliliği veya bilgi kaynaklarına güvenilir bir bağlantı olmaksızın yaygın bir şekilde erişilebilir durumdadır. Bu karmaşık çağdaş bağlamda hemen hemen herkes bir düşünce lideri hâline gelerek saf takipçilerini sonu belirsiz yollara sürükleyebilir. Ancak gerçek bir düşünce liderliği geçmişle bağlantılıdır ve aydınlık bir geleceğe doğru belirgin, iyi aydınlatılmış bir yol çizer. Tarih boyunca, zamansız bilgelikle iletişime geçerken zamanlarının genel görüşüne hitap edecek güçlü bir yaklaşım tutturabilen zekalara sahip gerçekten parlak düşünürlerin bir mirası oluşmuştur. Bu yetenek sayesinde insanların kalpleri ve zihinleri üzerinde önemli bir etki yaratırlar. Dünya geçtiğimiz yıl düşünce liderliği alanındaki bu devlerden birini kaybetmiştir.Profesör Malik Babiker Bedri kendi uzmanlık alanı içerisinde yenilikler getirip orijinal fikirler geliştirmekle kalmayan, aynı zamanda fikirlerinin etkisi kendi bilgi alanının sınırlarının çok ötesine ulaşan bir adamdı. Akademik ve profesyonel dünyada “İslami psikolojinin babası” olarak bilinen Bedri, dünyayı değiştiren devasa kültürel dönüşümlerin şekillendirilmesinde de rol almıştır. Bunların arasında Siyahi Amerikan Deneyimi, alkoliklik salgını ve küresel AIDS krizi yer almaktadır. Profesör Bedri pek çok kişinin kendileriyle, toplumlarıyla ve maneviyatlarıyla olan ilişkilerine bakma biçimlerini değiştirecek kültürel ve manevi bir devrim gerçekleştirmiştir. Eserlerinin bir kısmı İslami psikoloji ve daha genel olarak İslam düşüncesinde ufuk açıcı okumalar olmalarına rağmen önemli eserlerinin birçoğu hâlâ bilinmemektedir. Bunun sebebi belki de Bedri’nin alçakgönüllü oluşu ve kendi reklamını yapmaktan çekinmesidir. Bu şahsiyetin, kendisini insanlık tarihinin en büyük düşünürleri arasında konumlandıran katkılarının önemi kabul edilmelidir. Bu makale Bedri’nin hayatı boyunca yaptığı katkıların kronolojik ve tematik gelişiminin bir tablosunu çıkarmakta ve çalışmalarının önemini ve dünyadaki etkisini ortaya koymaktadır.Profesör Bedri’nin yazıları ve düşüncesi birden fazla alanı kapsamakla birlikte çalışmalarının çoğu iki ana sınıfa ayrılmıştır: 1) Psikolojinin yerlileştirilmesi (psikolojinin Araplar ve diğerleri için kültürel açıdan anlamlı hâle getirilmesi) ve 2) Psikolojinin İslamileştirilmesi. Bu sınıflandırmalar içerisinde Bedri’nin yaşamı boyunca yaptığı akademik ve profesyonel katkılar için başka ayrımlar da yapılabilir. Bunlar 1a) Yerli psikolojinin küreselleşmesi ve 2a) Yerli İslami psikoloji.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/393	Abdussalam, Ahmad Shehu	Intra-Muslim Conflicts: A Linguistic Representation	2008-01-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 25 No. 1 (2008): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 1-19	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v25i1.393	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/393/2153	The global Muslim community is multi-racial, multi-lingual, and multi-cultural. Over the centuries, religious groups emerged due to historical circumstances, political allegiances, interpretation of texts, cultural influences, and varied theological denominations. In some cases, the resulting intra-group rivalry has led to intra-Muslim conflicts characterized by various levels of violence, conflict, rhetoric, and verbal abuse. This article investigates the linguistic trends related to representing intra-Muslim conflicts, the factors and strategies of utilizing linguistic representation, and the classification of common terms within the context of such conflicts. It also analyzes the implications of certain vocabularies, structures, and discourse styles that represent the positions of opposing groups, perceptions of self and others, and how linguistic representation can help resolve intra-Muslim conflict. I use a pragmatic analysis to search for cultural and religious connotations in samples of common terms employed in the conflicts in question. Although the global Muslim community is multi-lingual, Arabic terms are commonly used in intra-Muslim conflicts. Given this reality, I focus on Arabic terms and present only a few non-Arabic loan words that have been adopted.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/394	Hakyemez, Cemil	Bada and Its Role in the Debates over Shi`i Doctrine	2008-01-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 25 No. 1 (2008): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 20-39	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v25i1.394	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/394/2154	This article examines the sense and significance of bada. I investigate when and who devised this concept, discuss its use as a proof in debates among the Shi`ahs concerning the Imamate after going through several transformations, and analyze the Shi`i theologians’ efforts to interpret it in line with the doctrine of naskh (abrogation) in order to demonstrate that bada is not one of the bases upon which Shi`i belief is grounded.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/395	Hellyer, H. A.	Muslims in Europe: Precedent and Present	2008-01-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 25 No. 1 (2008): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 40-62	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v25i1.395	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/395/2155	Muslims and Islam have been at the center of some of the most vital post-9/11 debates. In Europe, the controversy has intensified due to the conflation of the aforementioned discussions and the arguments currently raging in Europe surrounding European identity. In such parleys, the assumption has been that Muslims in Europe are an alien presence with a short and temporary history. This article seeks to demonstrate that historically speaking, this is not necessarily a foregone conclusion. The integration of Muslims and the recognition of Islam may take place through a variety of different ways owing to the specificities of individual European nation-states. However, they will need to consider the past precedents of the Muslim presence in order to appropriately organize the present and in looking to the future.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/396	Sulaiman, Maliah; Siraj, Siti Alawiah; Ibrahim, Shahul Hameed Mohamed	Internal Control Systems in West Malaysia’s State Mosques	2008-01-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 25 No. 1 (2008): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 63-81	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v25i1.396	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/396/2157	The embezzlement of funds from religious organizations, particularly in western church institutions, is becoming more common. Such scandals have raised concerns about their internal control systems. Despite the lack of any reported financial scandals in mosques, there is a growing concern as to whether they experience the same deficiencies as other religious institutions do. Our study examines the internal control procedures related to the receiving income and disbursing funds in West Malaysia’s state mosques. A questionnaire survey and informal interviews were used to collect the data. The results indicate that these mosques have a strong internal control system vis-à-vis these two activities. This study also reveals that their practice of several basic control activities (e.g., segregating duties, recording financial transactions, and authorizing particular activities) is satisfactory. Though this is an exploratory study, the results may provide a benchmark for further studies examining internal control practices in religious organizations.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/397	Crane, Robert Dickson	Human Rights in Traditionalist Islam: Legal, Political, Economic, and Spiritual Perspectives	2008-01-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 25 No. 1 (2008): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 82-105	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v25i1.397	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/397/2156	The vaunted clash of civilizations has grown into a Fourth World War of demonization against Islam. The newest strategy is to single out Islam’s essential values, deny that they exist, and assert that their absence constitutes the Islamic threat. This article shows the common identity of classical American and classical Islamic thought so that Muslims, Christians, and Jews can unite against religious extremism. Muslim jurisprudents developed the world’s most sophisticated code of human responsibilities and rights. This is now being revived as the common heritage of western civilization based on the premise that justice reflects a truth higher than man-made positivist law and on the corollary that the task of religion is to translate transcendent truth into the transcendent law of compassionate justice.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/398	Thasneem, Umer O.	Two Souls in Search of an Oasis	2008-04-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 25 No. 2 (2008): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 1-15	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v25i2.398	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/398/2147	This paper studies the quest for self and identity in the works of Muhammad Asad and Kamala Das (known as Kamala Surayya after she embraced Islam) from a broadly comparative perspective. The first section discusses this theme in the context of Muhammad Asad’s epochal The Road to Mecca, and the second section focuses on the poems of Kamala Das. I explore how these two authors, belonging to two disparate geographical and cultural milieus, found refuge in Islamic monotheism from the existential crisis that haunts modern humanity.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/399	Olimat, Muhamad S.	The Fourth Wave of Democratization	2008-04-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 25 No. 2 (2008): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 16-48	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v25i2.399	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/399/2148	The tragic events of 9/11 provided the impetus for a fourth wave of democratization in the Arab world. This new phase contains a democratic opportunity that is gathering momentum and, if managed well, will materialize into a genuine transition to democracy across the region. Under this wave, democratization is a matter of security, necessity, and moral imperative. The long-term western policy of “order” at the expense of “change” has proven detrimental to world peace. In this wave, Islamists seem to be leading the way in landslide electoral victories. Dealing with them is unavoidable if democratization is to succeed. Simultaneously, Islamists must reciprocate pragmatically, conducting themselves as reliable partners or else their political demise is imminent. I examine the post-9/11 predicament of democracy in the Arab world and discuss its strengths, weaknesses, achievements, and failures in comparison with previous attempts. Elections are perceived as necessary – but not necessarily – sufficient, steps for regimes to qualify as democratic. Elections that result in substantive institutional reform certainly enhance the prospects of such a transition. Some intellectual contributions continue within the trend of the third wave’s “exclusionary” thought, thereby creating a sort of “gap” vis-à-vis incorporating the region within the global trends of democratization. This article remedies that deficiency.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/400	El-Mesawi, Mohamed El-Tahir	Muslim Reformist Action in Nineteenth-century Tunisia	2008-04-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 25 No. 2 (2008): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 49-82	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v25i2.400	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/400/2151	This article revisits the origins of the Islamic reformist movement that arose in response to the challenges presented by western civilization in the nineteenth century. Tunisia was chosen because the spirit of reform manifested itself in the form of intellectual activity and socio-political action. The article highlights the features of the Tunisian experience before the French occupation in 1881, reveals the cooperation and complementary relationship between religious scholars and statesmen that gave the reform efforts their substance and form, and discusses the dynamic of the forces that were in play and helped determine the attempted reforms’ fate.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/401	Sajjadi, Seyed Mahdi	Religious Education and the Delegitimation of Knowledge	2008-04-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 25 No. 2 (2008): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 83-99	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v25i2.401	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/401/2152	The velocity of information production has increased at all levels, including the global. These expansions lead to the delegitimation of knowledge by equating information with knowledge or the predominance of information over knowledge. Given that this situation has caused epistemological challenges for the process of religious education, this article attempts to study the epistemological problems and challenges posed by information technology (IT) in this area.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/402	Günther, Sebastian	In our days, religion has once again become something alien: Al-Khattabi’s Critique of the State of Religious Learning in Tenth-century Islam	2008-07-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 25 No. 3 (2008): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 1-30	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v25i3.402	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/402/2138	No Abstract
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/403	Reda, Nevin	The Qur’anic Talut (Saul) and the Rise of the Ancient Israelite Monarchy: An Intertextual Reading	2008-07-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 25 No. 3 (2008): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 31-51	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v25i3.403	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/403/2139	Using contemporary ideas of intertextuality, this study investigates the Qur’anic story of Talut (2:246-51), the first Israelite monarch, as it is set against the background of the Biblical account. A verse-by-verse analysis yields the Qur’anic sequence of events, which includes Talut’s nomination, the Ark’s appearance, crossing the river, Goliath’s defeat, and David’s succession. The Biblical counterparts, located within the books of Joshua, Judges, and I Samuel, feature such characters as Joshua, Gideon, Samuel, and Saul. The Qur’an is thereby reading the books of Joshua, Judges 6-8, I Samuel 1-7, and I Samuel 8-31 synoptically, and the Talut story is a harmonized account of these narratives. Reading between the two texts enhances the Qur’anic story, showing how it functions as a blueprint for the synoptic reading, in addition to furthering our understanding of Talut, who provides a typological prefiguration for Muhammad. However, the synoptic reading also enhances the Biblical story, showing the skill with which the multiple consecutive narratives implicitly argue for judgeship as opposed to kingship in the post-exilic context.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/404	Rustom, Mohammed	Equilibrium and Realization: William Chittick on Self and Cosmos	2008-07-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 25 No. 3 (2008): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 52-60	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v25i3.404	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/404/2140	William Chittick, currently professor of religious studies at the State University of New York (Stony Brook), is an internationally renowned expert on Islamic thought. His contributions to the fields of Sufism and Islamic philosophy have helped paint a clearer picture of the intellectual and spiritual landscape of Islamic civilization from the seventh/thirteenth century onwards. Yet Chittick is not simply concerned with discussions in Islamic thought as artifacts of premodern intellectual history. His vast knowledge of the Islamic intellectual tradition serves as the platform from which he seeks to address a broad range of contemporary issues. In this short essay, I will outline Chittick’s writings on the self within the context of his treatment of cosmology. Rather than being outdated ways of looking at the universe and our relationship to it, Chittick argues that traditional Islamic cosmological teachings are just as pertinent to the question of the self today as they were yesterday.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/405	Takim, Liyakat	Revivalism or Reformation: The Reinterpretation of Islamic Law in Modern Times	2008-07-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 25 No. 3 (2008): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 61-81	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v25i3.405	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/405/2141	Since the events of 9/11, there has been much debate in Muslim circles regarding the question of reformation. More specifically, among questions that have been posed are: how can a religion believed to be immutable and constant regulate and serve the needs of a changing community? How can a legal system formulated in the eighth and ninth centuries respond to the requirements of twenty-first century Muslims? Is there a need for reformation in Islam? If so, where should it begin and in which direction should it proceed? These are some of the most challenging questions facing contemporary scholars of Islam. Some scholars suggest that reformation should be interwoven with the reexamination of the authenticity and pivotal roles of the sunnah and the hadith,2 while others want to revisit Islamic law as it was formulated in the classical period and reexamine the traditional exegetical literature. This implies that the proposed reformation should be based not only on changing institutions, but also on a reevaluation of traditional sources and hermeneutics. The recently published Progressive Muslims seeks to provide alternative interpretations of Islam and to refute the views of those who present a static and monolithic Islam.3 In order to examine the issue of reformation, it is essential, at the outset, to discuss Islamic law’s development and evolution during the classical period (the seventh to tenth centuries). Thus, I begin with a brief overview of its classical exposition, the various factors that shaped its formulation, and then explore some of the possible venues in which reformation can take place.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/406	Hehmeyer, Ingrid	Water and Sign Magic in al-Jabin, Yemen	2008-07-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 25 No. 3 (2008): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 82-96	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v25i3.406	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/406/2143	The preserved heritage of al-Jabin, a town located in Yemen’s western highlands, offers a unique opportunity to document traditional water engineering principles. There are no springs in the immediate vicinity, because the town is perched at the edge of the mountain escarpment. Even today, water is provided by open cisterns that collect surface run-off following a rain. But as the rains needed to feed the system are highly unpredictable, the water supply is never secure. The perimeter wall of one of the cisterns bears a group of seven signs, a detailed description of which is given in Kitab Shams al-Ma`arif wa-Lata’if al-`Awarif, a work attributed to Ahmad ibn `Ali al-Buni (d. 1225), a well-known prolific writer on magic. Al-Buni explains that the signs symbolize God’s supreme name and thus display great magical power of a protective and well-wishing nature. Generally speaking, magical practices attempt to influence the course of natural events by calling upon a superhuman force. In the case of the cistern, God’s supreme name was inscribed in the hopes that this would lead to a guaranteed water supply. While it is easy to dismiss al-Buni’s text and the observed practice in al-Jabin as superstitious frailty, one needs to bear in mind that under life-threatening circumstances, even people in the modern West easily resort to magical procedures.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/407	Saleh, Walid	Death and Dying in the Qur’an	2008-07-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 25 No. 3 (2008): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 97-110	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v25i3.407	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/407/2144	Death is a central element in the Qur’an. In this discursive essay, the importance of death and the afterlife is discussed and highlighted.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/408	Safi, Omid	Between the Seventh and the Twenty-first: Musings on Texts and Contexts in the Early Twenty-first Century	2008-07-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 25 No. 3 (2008): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 111-118	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v25i3.408	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/408/2145	Monotheistic traditions of the Abrahamic variety have commonly conceived of the Divine interacting with this world through the Divine Word. No surprise, then, that the Qur’an refers to the Jews, Christians, and Muslims as “People of the Book” (Ahl al-Kitab). Yet the task of seeking and finding God is not as simple as opening a book, even the Book. Reading religious words necessitates some self-awareness about the revelation’s context, the history of interpretations that stands between us and the text, and our own situatedness. What follows is a series of musings on these principles.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/409	Abdullah, Abdul-Samad	Intertext and Allusion in the Qur’anic Presentation of Noah’s Story	2008-10-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 25 No. 4 (2008): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 1-20	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v25i4.409	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/409/2133	This study explores the Qur’anic presentation of the story of Noah and his people. In particular, it examines the purposes behind the variations and similarities found in the s´rahs that mention it and focuses on three fundamental aspects: linguistic or stylistic variations, religious or moral purposes that determine a particular linguistic or stylistic register and contextualize the story within a particular s´rah, and the extent to which the style serves that s´rah’s objectives. Moreover, while this story has very clear and consistent themes, each s´rah’s concern and context to some extent shapes its rendering therein. Hence, I propose that the repetition of this story is a response to a particular context or conforms to the particular aims and objectives of the s´rah in which it appears. This repetition or intertext and allusion therefore become desirable, if not necessary, for both religious and stylistic requirements.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/410	Khan, Israr Ahmad	Amin Ahsan Islahi: An Introduction to His Tafs¥r Methodology	2008-10-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 25 No. 4 (2008): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 21-45	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v25i4.410	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/410/2134	Amin Ahsan Islahi (1903-97), an illustrious Islamic scholar from India, is the author of the Urdu-language Tadabbur-e-Qur’an, the first tafs¥r of its kind. In it, he has applied a unique method of interpreting the revealed words that, he rightly claims, he actually borrowed from his great teacher `Abd al-Hamid al-Farahi (1861-1930). According to him, this methodology leads to the unity of meaning and hence to the unity of thought. Its salient feature is what he refers to as “coherence in the Qur’an” (na`m al-Qur’OEn). Identifying the coherence between the Qur’an’s verses enables the commentator to establish cohesion among apparently conflicting passages within a s´rah. Coherence is not merely an academic witticism (la‹¥fah `ilm¥yah); rather, it is an intellectual endeavor (al-sa`y¥ al-`ilm¥) based on the Qur’anic principle of deliberation (al-tadabbur) to apply certain rules to the text in order to unfold the truth enshrined in the divine statements. Islahi’s work is a methodological and practical example of na`m al-Qur’OEn. This paper seeks to introduce his methodology in detail as applied in his work with a view to formulating its system of practical application in tafs¥r.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/411	Islahi, Abdul Azim	The Monetary Thought of Two Sixteenth-Century Muslim Scholars	2008-10-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 25 No. 4 (2008): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 46-60	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v25i4.411	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/411/2135	Muslim scholars of the sixteenth century continued the tradition of writing on economic issues. Their work, however, is characterized by the period’s overall feature of imitation and repetition and thus reflects hardly any advancement of monetary thought since the works of earlier Muslim scholars. This is clearly reflected in the two representative treatises on money: those of al-Suyuti (d. 1506), written at the beginning of the century, and of al-Tumurtashi (d. 1598), written at its end. The history of Islamic economic thought is a well-researched area of Islamic economics. To the best of our knowledge, however, all such research stopped at the end of the fifteenth century, the age of Ibn Khaldun and al-Maqrizi. The present paper seeks to advance this research and intends to investigate the monetary thought of Muslim scholars during the sixteenth century (corresponding to the hijr¥ years of 906 to 1009.) Beginning with an overview of earlier monetary thought in Islam to provide the necessary background information, it then goes on to note that particular century’s monetary problems in order to provide a perspective for the discussion of monetary thought among Muslim scholars. For the purpose of comparison, European monetary thought of the same period is also analyzed. Due to limitations of time and space, this paper concentrates on the relevant treatises and does not deal with the piecemeal opinions scattered throughout the voluminous corpus of Islamic literature. Thus, it focuses on al-Suyuti and al-Tumurtashi, as I could locate only their two exclusively monetary works. Hopefully this modest initiative will spur others to conduct more extensive research on the subject.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/412	Williams, Wesley	Black Muslim Theology and the Classical Islamic Tradition: Possibilities of a Rapprochement	2008-10-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 25 No. 4 (2008): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 61-89	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v25i4.412	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/412/2136	Elijah Muhammad declared unapologetically that “God is aman.” This anthropomorphist doctrine does violence to modern normative Islamic articulations of tawú¥d (monotheism), the articulations of which involve God’s “otherness” from the created world. The Nation of Islam (NOI), therefore, has been the target of polemics from Muslim leaders who, from within and without the United States, have declared its irredeemable heterodoxy. But in premodern Islam, heresy was in the eye of the beholder and “orthodoxy” was a precarious and shifting paradigm. This paper attempts to, in the words of Zafar Ishaq Ansari, “examine how the ‘Nation of Islam’ fits into the framework of Islamic heresiology.”
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/413	Satha-Anand, Chaiwat	The Ship and the Stranger: A Metaphorical Approach to Governance and Islam	2008-10-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 25 No. 4 (2008): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 90-107	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v25i4.413	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/413/2137	Relying on a metaphorical approach aiming to produce effects that could change how the world is seen and to help free Muslims from restrictive and conventional religious understanding, this paper discusses the issues of governance and Islam by using the metaphors of “the ship” and “the stranger.” It argues that both help illuminate the idea of “soft governance” in Islam, understood as an attempt to meaningfully connect a multiplicity of actors from different terrains with complex relationships among themselves in the process of governing with a far more pluralistic conceptualization of power.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/414	Sahin, Bican	Toleration, Political Liberalism, and Peaceful Coexistence in the Muslim World	2007-01-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 24 No. 1 (2007): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 1-24	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v24i1.414	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/414/2174	How can Muslim societies marked by religious, cultural, and ethnic diversity secure peace and stability? I argue that the principle of toleration provides the most appropriate environment for the peaceful coexistence of these differences, for individuals living in a polity can adopt different moral views and experience their cultural, ethnic, and other differences peacefully. Toleration is mainly a characteristic of liberal democratic regimes. However, different traditions of liberalism lead to different versions of liberal democracy. Also, not all versions of liberalism value toleration to the same degree. I argue that a liberal democracy based on “political” rather than “comprehensive” liberalism provides the broadest space for the existence of differences, for it does not present a shared way of life, but only a political framework within which individuals and groups with different worldviews can solve their common political problems. However, a liberal democracy based on comprehensive liberalism requires cultural groups and/or individuals to subscribe to fundamental liberal values (e.g., autonomy), and this stance limits its room for toleration. Thus, if liberal democracy is going to be introduced into the Muslim world to bring about peace and stability, it must be a liberal democracy based on political, rather than comprehensive, liberalism.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/415	Dusuki, Asyraf Wajdi; Abdullah, Nurdianawati Irwani	Maqasid al-Shari`ah, Maslahah, and Corporate Social Responsibility	2007-01-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 24 No. 1 (2007): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 25-45	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v24i1.415	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/415/2175	The doctrine of corporate social responsibility (CSR), which has emerged and developed rapidly as a field of study, is a framework for the role of business in society. It sets standards of behavior to which a company must subscribe in order to impact society in a positive and productive manner while abiding by values that exclude seeking profit at any cost. Despite the many attempts to construe CSR initiatives, it remains open to wide criticism for its inherent problems via-à-vis justification, conceptual clarity, and possible inconsistency. These problems are more acute when it comes to implementing and operationalizing CSR on the ground, especially in a situation that involves trade-offs. This paper offers an instructive understanding of CSR from an Islamic perspective. In particular, the implication of maqasid al-Shari`ah (the Shari`ah’s objectives) and the application of maslahah (the public good) to CSR are discussed in detail to shed light on how Islam’s holistic and dynamic perception of CSR take into consideration reality and ever-changing circumstances. These principles also provide a better framework that managers can use when faced with potential conflicts arising from the diverse expectations and interests of a corporation’s stakeholders.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/416	Solihu, Abdul Kabir Hussain	Making Sense of Natural Disasters: An Islamic Hermeneutics of Malevolent Phenomena in Nature and Its Implication for Sustainable Development	2007-01-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 24 No. 1 (2007): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 46-72	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v24i1.416	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/416/2176	Islam states that both natural phenomena and humanity are created in the best conceivable pattern. Yet the physical world experiences occasional disasters that threaten sustainable development. This study seeks to provide a framework for understanding this phenomenon within the Islamic ethico-religious perspective by focusing on such natural disasters as earthquakes, cyclones, subsidence, and floods. In an attempt to demonstrate this, I highlight the Qur’anic perspective of how natural resources have been overwhelmingly a source of boon and occasionally a source of bane. Drawing on that perspective, I provide two accounts for a proper understanding of this phenomenon: a macroscopic perspective that dissociates disastrous effects from natural disturbances, and another perspective that, based on moral law, attributes disasters to humanity’s violation of the divine moral law. That is, natural disasters are not disastrous to all creations unless they befall vulnerable communities, and when they are disastrous they are not natural but human-induced. Both perspectives suggest the imperative of the ecosystem and the divine moral law in the course of social and natural development.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/417	Kayadibi, Saim	Ijtihad by Ra’y: The Main Source of Inspiration behind Istihsan	2007-01-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 24 No. 1 (2007): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 73-95	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v24i1.417	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/417/2177	This essay investigates the implementation of istihsan (juristic preference) in the early history of Islam by identifying the concept of ijtihad (independent effort) and ra’y (juristic opinion), both of which played an enormous role in the development of Islamic law. Ijtihad by ra’y (personal judgment in juridical judgment) has been practiced from the time of the Prophet, as reflected in several hadiths narrated by Mu`adh ibn Jabal (d.18/640). The Prophet taught him how to use personal discretion and encouraged the Companions to undertake ijtihad by ra’y with regard to various issues. The criteria of personal judgment in istihsan indicate a direct relationship between istihsan and ijtihad by ra’y. The nature of istihsan, the wisdom behind it, and the wisdom of its use is quite considerable. As istihsan is considered a product of ijtihad, it represents simplicity, ease, and the lifting of difficulties. If the resulting qiyas (analogy) is not in keeping with the Shari`ah’s spirit, then the ruling of similarities should be abandoned in order to give a ruling according to the special evidence that justifies its spirit. The definitions of istihsan, ijtihad, and ra’y; the historical perspective of ra’y; the validity of ijtihad and its implementation at the time of the Prophet and the Companions; and the practices of ijtihad in terms of istihsan among the Companions are all explored in this paper.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/418	Cleary, Matthew; Glazier, Rebecca	Contemporary Islamism: Trajectory of a Master Frame	2007-04-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 24 No. 2 (2007): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 1-21	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v24i2.418	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/418/2169	Islamism proposes a vision of a society united by religion above all else – a vision that the West has difficulty theorizing and even comprehending. This vision and the social movements that have accompanied it are firmly rooted in the Muslim world’s history and traditions. This paper adopts a frame analytic perspective to examine and understand the progression of political Islam from the nationalism of the interwar period and beyond to the radical jihadism of today. In so doing, it contributes to the literature on framing by providing an analytically rich and theoretically valuable example of framing tactics in social movements. It also contributes to the growing literature on political Islam (Islamism) by providing a new and insightful perspective on its emergence and acceptance in the Muslim world.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/419	Berghout, Abdelaziz	Toward an Islamic Framework for Worldview Studies: Preliminary Theorization	2007-04-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 24 No. 2 (2007): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 22-43	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v24i2.419	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/419/2170	The paper examines the importance of designing a framework for studying worldviews within the parameters of contemporary Islamic thought. It briefly reviews both selected western and Islamic stances on worldview studies. The literature reveals that research on this topic and its application to different spheres has become a topic of some interest to many intellectual circles, particularly in the western context. Hence, the possibility of forming an Islamic civilizational framework for an inquiry into people’s worldviews needs to be assessed. This article follows a textual analysis and inductive approach to analyze the prospects of formulating an Islamic framework for research on worldviews and its applications. It concludes that western scholars have made considerable efforts in treating people’s worldviews as a field of study, while Muslim scholars have not. In this respect, many western researchers have contributed to developing worldview studies as a separate field of inquiry, including the history of concept, subject matter, objectives, kinds, methods, and applications. Therefore, the need to enhance the Islamic input and research pertaining to this field by introducing an Islamic civilizational framework and approach of inquiry becomes apparent.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/420	Ali, Muhammad Mumtaz	Liberal Islam: An Analysis	2007-04-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 24 No. 2 (2007): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 44-70	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v24i2.420	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/420/2171	In recent years, the focus of research and public perception has been on liberal, moderate, and modernist Islam. Liberal Islam advocates liberal solutions to the problems of religion and society, namely, interpretations of Islam that have a special concern for democracy, women’s rights and empowerment, freedom of thought, and other contemporary issues. Its adherents also forcefully assert that liberal Islam is authentic, not just merely a western creation, and therefore genuinely reflects the true Islamic tradition. In addition, they claim that the ummah (the Muslim world) should think and act in terms of adoption, reconciliation, and accommodation vis-à-vis the West to solve its problem of continuing undevelopment. I contend that the liberal perception and prescription are unrealistic and imaginative, that they contain inherent weaknesses, and that the liberal prescription is irrelevant to the ummah’s development.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/421	Berggren, D. Jason	More Than the Ummah: Religious and National Identity in the Muslim World	2007-04-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 24 No. 2 (2007): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 71-93	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v24i2.421	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/421/2172	Many scholars argue that Muslims are more likely to identify themselves in religious terms than as members of particular national political communities. As such, since they are more likely to claim a transnational, religious identity, they should consistently show weaker claims of national, regional, and municipal identity; be less willing to fight for their country; and show lower levels of national pride, regardless of country, region, and majority or minority status. Using data from the 1995-1997 World Values Survey from ten countries, which were supplemented by data from Zogby International and the Pew Research Center, I found that while Muslims tend to be very religious, they do not embrace transnationalism or lack strong national feelings to an exceptional degree when compared with non-Muslims. In fact, many are proud of their country and willing to fight for it.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/422	Blomfield, Bridget	Studying Islam Abroad	2007-07-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 24 No. 3 (2007): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 1-23	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v24i3.422	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/422/2163	Acquire knowledge, because he who acquires it in the way of the Lord performs an act of piety; who speaks of it, praises the Lord; who seeks it, adores God; who dispenses instruction in it, bestows alms; and who imparts it to its fitting objects performs an act of devotion to God. Knowledge enables its possessor to distinguish what is forbidden from what is not; it lights the way to Heaven; it is our friend in the desert, our society in solitude, our companion when bereft of friends; it guides us to happiness; it sustains us in misery; it is our ornament in the company of friends; it serves as an amour against our enemies. With knowledge, the obedient servant of God rises to the heights of goodness and to a noble position, associates with sovereigns in this world, and attains to the perfection of happiness in the next.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/423	Hermansen, Marcia	The Academic Study of Sufism at American Universities	2007-07-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 24 No. 3 (2007): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 24-45	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v24i3.423	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/423/2164	This article provides an overview of the history and current situation of the academic study of Sufism (Islamic mysticism) at American universities. It examines Sufism’s place within the broader curriculum of Islamic studies as well as some of the main themes and approaches employed by American scholars. In addition, it explains both the academic context in which Sufi studies are located and the role of contemporary positions in Islamic and western thought in shaping its academic study.1 Topics and issues of particular interest to a Muslim audience, as well as strictly academic observations, will be raised. In comparison to its role at academic institutions in the traditional Muslim world,2 Sufi studies has played a larger role within the western academic study of Islam during the twentieth century, especially the later decades. I will discuss the numerous reasons for this in the sections on the institutional, intellectual, and pedagogical contexts.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/424	Ahmad, Fauzia	Muslim Women’s Experiences of Higher Education in Britain	2007-07-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 24 No. 3 (2007): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 46-69	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v24i3.424	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/424/2165	I explore British South Asian Muslim women’s experiences of higher education and how it impacts identity construction and negotiation. Through semi-structured interviews with thirty-five undergraduate and post-graduate Muslim female university students, I reflect on their perceived and actual experiences. By stressing how representations of them influence their participation and experiences, I analyze how individual subjectivities are mediated and negotiated while reflecting common experiences. I also consider their accounts of the social and personal benefits they felt that they gained during their studies, as well as to the more disturbing and racialized aspects of their experiences. They differentiated between three overlapping forms of beneficial experience: academic, social, and personal. While instances of anti-Muslim racism were rare or subtle, certain university structures and expectations of what being a mainstream student means often contributed to a noted sense of “othering.” I conclude by highlighting how their accounts of their university experiences directly challenge those stereotypes that misrepresent educated Muslim women as “religious and cultural rebels.”
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/425	Mir, Shabana	American Muslim Women and Cross-Gender Interaction on Campus	2007-07-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 24 No. 3 (2007): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 70-91	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v24i3.425	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/425/2166	This article is based on a study of American Muslim undergraduate women’s identity construction via gendered behavior in university spaces. I conducted the study in 2002-03 at two private East Coast universities. My research questions centered upon the religious, ethnic, gender, and cultural/racial identities of American Muslim female undergraduates. I was also interested in the nature of pluralism at American college campuses; I believed that an interesting test of this pluralism would be to see how hospitable it was to the development of American Muslim women’s identities.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/426	Hashim, Rosnani	Intellectualism in Higher Islamic Traditional Studies: Implications for the Curriculum	2007-07-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 24 No. 3 (2007): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 92-115	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v24i3.426	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/426/2167	The number of faculties and universities offering Islamic traditional sciences or studies has slowly increased over the past decades. However, the Islamic community has not felt their graduates’ impact other than as teachers or religious personnel. In fact, if the criteria used to assess Islamic education is the growth of a genuine, original, and adequate Islamic thought or intellectualism, then most of these institutions have failed to provide such an education. I examine the goals and curriculum of higher Islamic education and the conditions conducive for the growth of intellectualism. I argue that poor pedagogy, which does not offer teaching methods that encourage critical and ethical thinking, contributed to the state of affairs. Further, I argue that the basic problem is the inadequate conceptualization of knowledge as regards Islamic epistemology in the curriculum and the lack of academic freedom. I assert that the issue of what knowledge is most valuable for today’s intellectual and ethical Muslims has not been resolved and that this affects the curriculum structure and, inevitably, the programs of Islamic traditional sciences. The need to reintroduce Islamic philosophy into the curriculum is one of this article’s major arguments.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/427	Khan, Saad Omar	The “Caliphate Question”: British Views and Policy toward Pan-Islamic Politics and the End of the Ottoman Caliphate	2007-10-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 24 No. 4 (2007): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 1-25	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v24i4.427	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/427/2158	This paper examines British approaches to the caliphate from the beginning of the First World War to the aftermath of its dissolution in 1924. Background will be given as to how the Islamic conception of the caliphate shifted over time. British use of the caliphate as a political tool in the nineteenth century is also examined, especially with regards to how strong British-Ottoman ties prior to the First World War affected India’s Muslims. The primary focus, however, will be on British ties with King Hussein of the Hejaz. British suggestions of an Arab caliphate encouraged the idea that Hussein should assume the title of caliph, which would later be a cause of agitation and concern for British policy in the British Empire. This is especially true with regards to India, as fear of Indo-Muslim opinion would deeply influence British policy when it came to the Ottoman Empire’s position in the post-bellum period. With the creation of the Turkish Republic and the subsequent disestablishment of the Ottoman caliphate, Hussein, sharif of the Hejaz, would officially announce his claim to the title. This dismayed the British foreign policy establishment, which strove to avoid suggestions of complicity lest further anti-British activity be encouraged in India. Eventually, the end of Hussein would come from Ibn Saud, his principle rival in the Arab world. Despite Hussein’s status as a British ally, the widespread anger against him in the Islamic world over the caliphate would persuade the British to distance themselves from him and his religious pretensions.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/428	Takim, Liyakat	The Origins and Evaluations of Hadith Transmitters in Shi`i Biographical Literature	2007-10-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 24 No. 4 (2007): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 26-49	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v24i4.428	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/428/2159	In this paper, I examine the provenance of the Shi`i biographical lexica on the imams’ disciples (the rijal) and propose possible reasons for the composition of these works in the eighth and ninth centuries. I then consider the authentications (tawthiqat) of those who report traditions from the imams and compare and contrast the methods of authentication in both the early and later biographical works. I also suggest possible reasons for the development of subsequent modes of authentication.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/429	Khan, Israr Ahmad	The Authentication of Hadith: Redefining Criteria	2007-10-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 24 No. 4 (2007): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 50-73	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v24i4.429	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/429/2160	Muslim scholars deserve appreciation for their invaluable contribution toward preserving the hadith literature’s authenticity. However, much more needs to be done to further strengthen its authenticity. Such great hadith authorities as Malik ibn Anas (d. 179 AH), Ahmad ibn Hanbal (d. 241 AH), al-Darimi (d. 255 AH), al-Bukhari (d. 256 AH), Muslim (d. 261 AH), Ibn Majah (d. 273 AH), Abu Da’ud (d. 275 AH), al-Tirmidhi (d. 279 AH), al-Nasa’I (d. 303 AH), al-Darqutni (d. 385 AH), and al-Bayhaqi (d. 457 AH) did their best to identify original, authentic, and valid versions of the hadiths, mainly through verifying the chain of narrators (sanad). However, they did not check the text (matn) with the same zeal. This remains the case today, even to the extent that scrutinizing the text scrutiny is considered forbidden. While further verification of hadiths is still needed, this “closed door” toward verifying the text’s validity must be opened. The present article represents an attempt to redefine the criteria for checking the texts and then applying these criteria to certain selected hadiths recorded by al-Bukhari and Muslim.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/430	Abu Bakar, Nur Barizah	A Zakat Accounting Standard (ZAS) for Malaysian Companies	2007-10-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 24 No. 4 (2007): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 74-92	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v24i4.430	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/430/2162	This paper focuses on the need to harmonize the practice of zakat on companies throughout Malaysia by implementing a zakat accounting standard (ZAS). The objectives of this paper are fourfold: (1) to highlight the current practice of zakat on companies in Malaysia; (2) discuss the usefulness of AAOIFI FAS 9, MASB FRS i-1, and MASB TR i-1 as guidelines for developing a ZAS; (3) suggest a collaboration by various parties designed to pool initiatives, knowledge, and skills to develop a useful and favorable ZAS; and (4) to demonstrate that without proper education and a strong political will, there is a little hope of making any ZAS a reality.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/432	Abdul-Huk, M.	The Humanistic Note in Iqbal	2006-01-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 23 No. 1 (2006): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 1-14	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v23i1.432	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/432/2214	What Is Humanism?Like any other “ism,” humanism is a term of vague and varied usage, perhapsfinally identifiable, but one from which certain aspects may be pickedout.Humanism, as a term for a certain attitude of mind, has a somewhatcurious historical genesis. I say curious, because the attitude itself is mucholder than the period by which it was given this label – is, perhaps, as oldas human nature itself. However, as a term of historical genesis, humanismcame to be applied to the view of life that began to oppose and be contradistinguishedfrom the older medieval view of life (since called “divinism”)from the time of the European Renaissance. Here, I can do no better thanquote almost in extenso Professor Ramsay Muir’s description of the essentialdifference between the divinism of the Middle Ages and the humanismof the periods both before and after the “divinistic” interregnum:The best men of the Middle Ages thought of the world as a place of struggleand discipline in preparation for another world; the Greeks thought ofit as a place of wonder and beauty which ought to be explored andenjoyed, and they thought little and vaguely about the idea of anotherworld. … for the best minds of the Middle Ages the highest duty of Manwas to conquer his passions and to subordinate his arrogant will to thewill of God by obeying the rules of life set forth by God’s Church. For theGreeks, Man’s highest duty was to make the most of himself and to developall his powers of mind and body in the most harmonious way, so thathe might enjoy the beauty of the world and be able to seek the truth ...
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/433	Dakroury, Aliaa Ibrahim	Toward a Philosophical Approach of the Hermeneutics of the Qur’an	2006-01-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 23 No. 1 (2006): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 15-34	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v23i1.433	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/433/2215	Although claims questioning whether religious sacred books can be “translated” or not have been heard for quite some time, they have increased with the emergence of globalization and the increasing openness and flow of information due to modern technology. In the context of the relationship between hermeneutics and communication, one could argue that interpreting the Qur’an is an interesting case study for many reasons. Among them is the number of debates and discourses that have been raised both for and against its translation. Another reason, perhaps one of the largest barriers according to some religious Muslim groups, is that the Qur’an is fundamentally revealed and written in Arabic, and, therefore, its true meaning cannot be translated into another language. Certain verses, such as “It is a Qur’an in Arabic, without any crookedness (therein): in order that they may guard against evil” (28:39), have been presented to support this argument.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/434	Mohamed, Yasien	The Islamic Philosophy of Labor and Crafts: The View of the Ikhwan al-Safa’, Isfahani, and Ibn Khaldun	2006-01-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 23 No. 1 (2006): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 35-51	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v23i1.434	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/434/2216	The purpose of this essay is to compare the views of the Ikhwan al-Safa’, Isfahani, and Ibn Khaldun on labor, not to trace their influences, which would require separate treatment. However, we could presume the direct or indirect influence of figures such as the Ikhwan al-Safa’. A study into the attitudes toward labor is important for understanding a society’s economic rise or decline.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/435	Sayyid, S.	Rituals, Ideals, and Reading the Qur’an	2006-01-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 23 No. 1 (2006): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 52-65	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v23i1.435	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/435/2217	This article discusses the role of the Qur’anic text in a Muslim’s life and why it should be viewed as a non-linear text designed to guide humanity, rather than as the foundation for a political order or a set of iron-clad laws for ruling a society.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/436	Ahmad, Abu Umar Faruq; Hassan, M. Kabir	The Time Value of Money Concept in Islamic Finance	2006-01-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 23 No. 1 (2006): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 66-89	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v23i1.436	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/436/2218	The time value of money is a basic investment concept and a basic element in the conventional theory of finance. The Shari`ah does not rule out this consideration, for it does not prohibit any increment in a loan given to cover the price of a commodity in any sale contract to be paid at a future date. What is prohibited, however, is making money’s time value an element of any lending relationship that considers it to have a predetermined value. Here, the Shari`ah requires that a loan be due in the same currency in which it was given. The value (i.e., purchasing power) of paper currencies varies due to changes in many variables over which the two parties of a loan contract usually have no control. This study examines possible modus operandi of time valuation according to the Shari`ah’s precepts vis-à-vis the concept of money, and whether any value can be attributed to time while considering money’s value. For this purpose, it investigates the juristic views on such relevant issues as the permissibility of difference between a commodity’s cash and credit prices and an increase and reduction of the loan’s amount in return for early repayment.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/437	Kaler, Helena	Islamic Responses to Modernity: Ayman al-Zawahiri and Farid Esack	2006-04-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 23 No. 2 (2006): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 1-19	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v23i2.437	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/437/2208	By examining the ideas of modernity and their manifestations in the ideas of Ayman al-Zawahiri and Farid Esack, this essay argues that both thinkers are deeply affected by the West’s Enlightenment ideas and differ mostly in their applications. The first part examines the idea of modernity itself, tracing its forms in the thought of Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Schmitt, Adorno, and Horkheimer, among others. The second part traces the relationship of al-Zawahiri and Esack to the ideas of modernity, defined here as subjectivity, political agency, social fragmentation, and the rise of the nation-state. In contrast to the assertion made by some that Islamist thinkers were only affected by technological, rather than ideological, modernity, it seems that both al-Zawahiri and Esack are, ideologically, children of their time.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/438	Tatari, Eren	Populism and Secularism in Turkey: The Headscarf Ban Policy	2006-04-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 23 No. 2 (2006): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 20-36	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v23i2.438	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/438/2209	This article analyzes the impact of two key components of Kemalist ideology, populism and secularism, on the policymaking process of modern Turkey by utilizing historical institutionalism and the political-cultural approach. The Headscarf Ban Policy, which has been implemented discretionarily since 1981 and intensively since 1997, provides an illustrative case study of the broader debates over freedom of religion, secularism, and democracy, and helps to uncover the influence of populism and secularism, as well as the interaction between these two principles. The analysis reveals the principle of populism, which has been much overlooked in the literature, as a key determinant of state-centric reforms as well as a method of legitimizing the undemocratic version of secularism advocated by the state.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/439	Ersahin, Seyfettin	Westernization, Mahmud II, and the Virtue Tradition	2006-04-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 23 No. 2 (2006): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 37-62	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v23i2.439	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/439/2210	The Ottoman reforms of the nineteenth century sought a reconciliation between Islam and western civilization. The ulama played a key role in this process by supporting the reformers’ desire to bring Islam closer to the needs of the age and of the empire. The reformers, chiefly Sultan Mahmud II and his close friends, gained the ulama’s support to such an extent that the Shaykh al-Islam wrote a treatise to persuade the masses to accept the reforms. Applying the traditional virtue literature to the Ottoman dynasty, he presented Sultan Mahmud II as an ideal caliph-sultan. This effort helped to westernize the traditional Ottoman political structure and society.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/440	Dakroury, Aliaa Ibrahim	Communication and the Rise of Early Islamic Civilization (570-632)	2006-04-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 23 No. 2 (2006): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 63-83	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v23i2.440	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/440/2211	The rise of early Islamic civilization suggests a position that contradicts Harold Innis’ theory of the bias of communication, in which his dominant group is empowered by a monopoly of the communication resources during a given time and space. This paper argues that the communication methods used by Prophet Muhammad’s alternative social force during the early seventh century were, in fact, the main tool that organized Islamic society, helped develop its ideals, and aided the expansion and formation of one of the world’s great civilizations. This paper discusses and analyzes the reasons behind the Prophet’s communication methods and the subsequent the rise of early Islamic civilization.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/441	Bruckmayr, Philipp	The Cham Muslims of Cambodia: From Forgotten Minority to Focal Point of Islamic Internationalism	2006-07-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 23 No. 3 (2006): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 1-23	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v23i3.441	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/441/2204	The Cham Muslims of Cambodia are descendents of Champa, a once-powerful Hindu-Buddhist kingdom located in modern-day central and southern Vietnam. Champa existed from the second century CE until its complete annexation by its long-time rival, the Dai Viet, in 1832.1 Its gradual loss of territory caused several waves of immigration to Cambodia between the crucial dates of 1471 and 1835 (the start of violent repression against the Cham in their last, and finally also annexed, principality: Panduranga).2 It seems that the first wave allied itself with Cambodia’s Malay community, with whom the Cham share ethno-linguistic (as both groups are speakers of Austronesian languages) and cultural (e.g., matrilinear customs) heritage, as well as their status as foreign immigrants. Through this contact, they were Islamized. This article presents an overview of the religious and political development of Cambodia’s Cham Muslims, most of whom are Sunnis, from the days of French colonialism up to the present, and shows how this formerly neglected minority became a showcase of Islamic internationalism. Contact persons or interviewees were recommended to me by Dr. Sos Mousine (CMDF, CAMSA, and the Ministry of Agriculture), Set Muhammadsis (CAMSA, CMDF) or Dato Hajji Alwi Muhammad (MAI Terengganu), or were sought out by myself. As I was mainly interested in religious change and the rebuilding of religious infrastructure, I visited many mosques and schools for interviews, which were conducted in English, Arabic, or with a Khmer or Cham translator.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/442	Peterson, Kristian	Reconstructing Islam: Muslim Education and Literature in Ming-Qing China	2006-07-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 23 No. 3 (2006): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 24-53	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v23i3.442	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/442/2205	During the sixteenth century when Islam was already established in China, Chinese Muslims began to critically examine their understanding of Islamic knowledge and how to transmit it to future generations. Traditional tutelage based on purely Arabic and Persian sources generally evaded a Muslim population that, for the most part, could no longer read the available rare Islamic texts. The subsequent reconstruction of Islamic knowledge and education emphasized the intersections between the Chinese and the Muslim communities’ cultural and religious heritages. The new specialized educational system, “scripture hall education” (jingtang jiaoyu), utilized Chinese as the language of instruction and incorporated aspects of traditional Chinese literati education in collaboration with newly retrieved Islamic sources from the Muslim heartland. The ensuing standardization and organization of curriculum and pedagogical techniques enabled peripatetic students to replicate this system throughout China. It also allowed the religious community’s leaders to direct the discourse concerning Islam and disseminate a specific interpretation of religious knowledge. This is most clearly displayed through the Han Kitab, the canonized corpus of Chinese Islamic texts written, approximately, during 1600-1750. This literature articulated Islamic principles through the lexicon of literary Chinese and replicated the ideology highlighted by the educational network. This paper analyzes why Islamic knowledge was lost and traces how the new educational system transformed the indigenous Islamic discourse, articulated through the Han Kitab literature, to reflect a distinctive Chinese Muslim interpretation of the faith.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/443	Ma, Haiyun	Patriotic and Pious Muslim Intellectuals in Twentieth-Century China: The Case of Ma Jian	2006-07-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 23 No. 3 (2006): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 54-70	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v23i3.443	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/443/2206	The fall of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) and the founding of the modern Chinese nation-state brought both opportunities and challenges to Chinese Muslims. No longer having to deal with emperorship and its foundational ideology, Confucianism, they were soon confronted with new state ideological impositions, namely, Han nationalism and socialism, imposed by the Republican and Communist regimes. These new challenges were both threatening and promising, for although the new ideologies were fundamentally antithetic to Islam, the new regimes promised an equal status to Chinese Muslims and saw how they could aid national diplomacy and international relations with Muslim countries. Within this context, China’s Muslim intellectuals tried to reorient and reposition Muslims and Islam by minimizing differences and maximizing commonalities during both the Republican and the Communist regimes. By studying Ma Jian (1906-78), one of modern China’s most influential and representative Muslim intellectuals, as well as his juxtaposition of Islam and China, I look at the way of being a modern Chinese Muslim intellectual in China’s post-1949 internal and international contexts. The Turkic Muslim communities in Xinjiang and elsewhere in China are excluded from this study.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/444	Cuthbert, Ross	Beijing Rides the Bandwagon: A Critical Analysis of Islam and Separatism in Xinjiang	2006-07-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 23 No. 3 (2006): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 71-88	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v23i3.444	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/444/2207	This paper offers a critical assessment of the Chinese Communist Party’s post-9/11 efforts to build international support for its security activities in its Xinjiang province. Xinjiang has traditionally presented the party with a particular challenge. It is remote and relatively underdeveloped, has borders with seven countries, and, most importantly, is inhabited by a large, concentrated, and restive Islamic minority known as the Uygurs. The party is very concerned about the presence of separatist elements among the Uygur population. Beijing’s activities to control such elements have traditionally been quite secretive. However, after 9/11, a Beijing-released report claimed that Xinjiang’s separatist activity is Islamist in nature and that groups operating within the region have ties to al-Qaeda and the Taliban. I argue that inconsistencies surrounding this report tend to undermine the party’s position. Furthermore, given the nature of Islamic practice in Xinjiang and the historical development of Uygur-Han relations in the region, it is more likely that the primary motivations for separatism are rooted in ethno-nationalist, rather than religious, considerations.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/445	Khan, Israr Ahmad	Classification of Abrogation in the Qur’an: A Critical Analysis	2006-10-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 23 No. 4 (2006): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 1-27	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v23i4.445	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/445/2198	Most classical-era Qur’anic studies scholars, among then Abu `Ubayd al-Qasim ibn Sallam (d. 224 AH), Makki ibn Abi Talib (d. 437 AH), Abd al-Rahman ibn al-Jawzi (d. 597 AH), Badr al-Din al- Zarkashi (d. 794 AH), and Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti (d. 911 AH) were enthusiastic supporters of the theory of abrogation. They claimed that the Qur’an contains three types of abrogation1: suspension of certain verses’ practical dimension only, expurgation of both the verses and their rulings, and exclusion of the verses even though their rulings are still valid. To substantiate their approach, they advanced hadiths comprising statements supposedly made by both the Companions (Sahabah) and the Followers (Tabi`un). A rational and critical scrutiny of these hadiths will reveal whether they can form the basis of such arguments. I will check the nature of these hadiths’ chains of narrators and weigh the views attributed to early Muslim scholars against reason. As regards the first category, several of my articles on these arguments have been published elsewhere.2 This article, which examines the remaining two categories, consists of two dimensions: applying the hadith criticism principle to these hadiths and checking their information in a rational manner.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/446	Latief, Hillman	Comparative Religion in Medieval Muslim Literature	2006-10-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 23 No. 4 (2006): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 28-62	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v23i4.446	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/446/2199	This article investigates medieval Muslim literature on the study of non-Islamic religions through the writings of al-Biruni and al-Shahrastani in their dealing with Hind (India) and the nomenclature of world religions. I focus on their perceptions of monotheism and polytheism. My findings show that they used different approaches, categories, and classification models of world religious traditions in general, and of Hind’s religious traditions in particular. Al-Biruni classifies Indian religions according to the religious outlooks found in Hindu texts or sayings of Hindu philosophers/theologians and in the attitudes of ordinary people in a popular context. Al-Shahrastani categorizes the divisions and subdivisions of Hindu beliefs and practices according to types of “idol worshippers.” This article points out that they dealt with some conceptual issues in their presentations, such as “religious representation,” “intermediaries,” and “anthropomorphism.”
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/447	Abu-Munshar, Maher	Islamicjerusalem: A Model for Multiculturalism	2006-10-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 23 No. 4 (2006): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 63-87	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v23i4.447	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/447/2200	This paper examines the extent to which `Umar ibn al-Khattab and Salah al-Din adhered to the Islamic vision toward non- Muslims and determines whether they established a multicultural society in Islamicjerusalem after the city’s first and second conquests. In addition, it provides a historical perspective to these two important events, focuses on their attitudes toward Islamicjerusalem’s non-Muslims inhabitants, and investigates whether the Muslims’ understanding of other religions is possible and whether it is an integral part of a pluralist, multicultural society.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/448	Bagheri, Khosrow; Khosravi, Zohreh	The Islamic Concept of Education Reconsidered	2006-10-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 23 No. 4 (2006): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 88-103	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v23i4.448	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/448/2201	Some authors have analyzed the Islamic concept of education in parallel to the assumed contrast between Islam and the liberal tradition. Hence, given the latter’s rationalist tendencies, an almost indoctrinatory essence is assumed for the Islamic concept of education. However, we argue that rationality is involved in all elements of the Islamic concept of education. There might be some differences between the Islamic and liberal conceptions of rationality, but these are not so sharp that the derivative Islamic concept of education can be equated with indoctrination. We suggest an Islamic concept of education that includes three basic elements: knowledge, choice, and action. Then, we show that, according to the Islamic texts, these elements have a background of wisdom.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/451	Ali, Muhamad Ali	The Rise of the Liberal Islam Network (JIL) in Contemporary Indonesia	2005-01-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 22 No. 1 (2005): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 1-27	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v22i1.451	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/451/2252	This paper seeks to shed some light on liberal Islamic movements in Indonesia, with specific reference to the Liberal Islam Network (Jaringan Islam Liberal [JIL]). It examines the network’s political, organizational, and intellectual origins, and also addresses an important alternative topic at a time when most scholarly research on contemporary Islam is focused on the phenomenon of Islamic fundamentalism.1 The article’s importance lies in its examination of the network’s rise in light of oversimplified views regarding contemporary Islam’s supposed homogeneity. JIL can be regarded as a social movement that is primarily intellectual in origin and orientation, but one that also has to face continued dialogues with political, social, and cultural circumstances. This paper will argue that JIL’s rise is a product of dynamic local, national, and international circumstances that lead to intellectual dynamism among the younger generation of Indonesian Muslims.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/452	Annuar, Hairul Azlan	Al-Wakalah and Customers’ Preferences toward It: A Case Study of Two Takaful Companies in Malaysia	2005-01-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 22 No. 1 (2005): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 28-49	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v22i1.452	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/452/2253	The agency system has been the main distribution channel for insurers. However, Syarikat Takaful Malaysia Berhad (STMB) does not implement it, while Takaful Nasional Sendirian Berhad (TNSB) does. This has a lot to do with juristic opinions (ikhtilaf) on whether a takaful company (mudarib) can use part of the participants’ capital (rabb al-mal) to pay for management expenses. An exploratory survey was undertaken to ascertain the respondents’ perception on the importance of agents. My study showed that customers prefer the agency system (al-wakalah) and that this system can generate greater benefits (manfa`at) to both parties.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/453	Bilici, Mucahit	“American Jihad”: Representations of Islam in the United States after 9/11	2005-01-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 22 No. 1 (2005): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 50-69	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v22i1.453	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/453/2254	This paper looks at competing uses of the concept of jihad in American society in the aftermath of 9/11. It examines three alternative meanings given to “American Jihad.” Three of the instances all have “American Jihad” as their title: a book by Steven Emerson, a commencement speech by a Harvard student, and an episode of NBC TV series “Law & Order.” All three cases are acts of politics and moments of regulation of the entry of the concept of jihad into cultural circulation.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/454	Ibrahim, M. Zakyi	Models of Communication in the Qur’an: Divine–Human Interaction	2005-01-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 22 No. 1 (2005): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 70-95	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v22i1.454	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/454/2255	This study uses models of communication, defined as “structures of symbols and rules designed to correspond to the relevant points of an existing structure or process,”1 to explain the process of communication between God and human beings. The invisibility of God to human beings, coupled with His difference in nature, appear to make such interaction difficult – but not impossible – to conceive. A general communication model is constructed in accordance with Qur’an 42:51. Later, specific models are drawn according to the verse’s segments. Each model is elaborated by examples from the Qur’an and the Hadith. In each model, I explicate the process of divine–human interaction by identifying the key elements of communication and their relationships. To devise the models, this study depends heavily on the Qur’an, identifies communication-related verse(s), analyzes the words’ semantic components, and reveals the expression’s rhetorical implications, all drawn from the primary sources of the classical and modern eras.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/455	Söylemez, Mehmet Mahfuz	The Jundishapur School: Its History, Structure, and Functions	2005-04-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 22 No. 2 (2005): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 1-27	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v22i2.455	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/455/2246	Located in the region of Alam (modern Khuzistan), Jundishapur was founded by the Sassanid emperor Shahpur I in 260. This city was home to the Jundishapur school (madrasah), one of the most important science centers in history, that harmonized within itself classical Greek philosophy, Indian culture, and the Persian scientific heritage. This fact becomes clear when one looks at its rich curriculum, which ranges from medical science and pharmacology to philosophy. This complex consisted of several sections, such as a medical school (bimaristan), a pharmacology laboratory, a translation bureau, a library, and an observatory. It also had a deep influence on Islamic culture and civilization through its professors, who, in the early years of `Abbasid rule, began to settle in the capital city of Baghdad and eventually established a similar school modeled on their school in Jundishapur. From that point on, these professors made a significant contribution to Muslim medical science and philosophy.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/456	Weiss, Dieter	Paths toward an Arab Knowledge Society	2005-04-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 22 No. 2 (2005): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 28-48	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v22i2.456	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/456/2247	The Arabic Science and Technology Gapand Its Economic Consequences in theInternational Development RaceDuring the first third of the twentieth century, self-critical Muslims askedthemselves two critical questions: “Why do Muslims remain behind, andwhy are others progressing?”1 The cause of this dilemma was the confusingexperience of the Muslim world’s decline and subsequent colonialdomination by the West, which hit the Arabs’ sense of self-worth in its core.Their repeated military defeats by Israel and dependency on foreign technicaland financial development aid demonstrated their own deficits. Theycould barely tolerate these humiliations, particularly since they were instriking contrast to the Qur’anic revelation, which promises Muslims theleading role in the world. The history of Islam’s expansion during the firstcentury of the Islamic era seemed to support this belief. However, its gradualdecline was repressed,2 and a fatal apologetic tendency (viz., the passionateattempt to prove to oneself and others that one’s own inferioritydoes not exist) became characteristic of the debates on how to find a suit-able way out of the crisis, as well as in the case of vital questions concerningsocioeconomic development.3In the 1960s, a central category of the Arabic worldview appeared inthe highly emotionalized unity of the “West” and “colonialism.” This narrowperspective of “the Arabs and the West” obstructed the Arab world’sview of the Far East’s economic and technological dynamics. Up until the1980s, few Arab economists in science and administration had any concreteidea of the education, research, and technology-based4 growth dynamic ofthe Asian “tiger states” and why they had been so spectacularly successful.This was largely due to the lack of personal vision, because the countries ofEast and Southeast Asia had little interest in those regions that were laggingbehind in the development race. Nor did they feel obligated to offer seminarevents, well-paid according to western examples, in order to remedyArab perception deficits.In other words, Arab economists only became aware of the [Asian]periphery countries’ dynamic by accident. Certainly, no learning processesdesigned to help the Arab world catch up (e.g., conducting case studies ofspecific countries, which could be done by students working on their universitytheses) took place. The responsible political leaders did not grasp thenecessity of such studies, and, therefore, no research means were madeavailable. The result was a second self-isolation that, in the 1970s, wasbecoming even greater.After the industrialization strategies of staving off world markets andimport substitution, this self-isolation now appeared in the form of a technologicalgap. The full extent of the R&D5 gap caught the attention of Arabgovernments only because of the oil-boom, when the OAPEC6 countries, inparticular, unexpectedly found themselves exposed to a massive presenceof East Asian periphery countries while building up infrastructural andlarge-scale industrial investments. However, oil revenues concealed theurgent need for massive investments in education and research in order tocatch up with other regions. It was deemed sufficient to expand educationalopportunities quantitatively, without regard to quality and job marketrequirements.7Growing budgetary demands in the face of the OAPEC countries’finite oil resources, as well as the unavoidable economic and political pressuresfor reform in the non-oil Arab states after the Soviet Union’s collapse,raised questions about a fundamental strategic reorientation. Addedto this was the increasing international pressure from low-wage Asiancountries to compete on the global level (particularly in such technologies ...
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/457	Jawad, Haifaa	Seyyed Hossein Nasr and the Study of Religion in Contemporary Society	2005-04-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 22 No. 2 (2005): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 49-68	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v22i2.457	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/457/2249	Seyyed Houssein Nasr is one of the main proponents of the traditional religious perspective, including the traditional Islamic point of view. His work is notable for many reasons, among them the following: its in-depth analysis of contemporary society’s spiritual poverty; its profound treatment of Islamic matters, 1 particularly in the context of the debate between Islamic modernism vs. Islamic traditionalism; its solid understanding of western philosophical thought and culture; its ability to present a compelling, critical appraisal of the modern predicament, boldly stating that which is perceived to be the truth, irrespective of whether or not it is fashionable or palatable as regards current opinion; and, lastly, its view of religion’s role in contemporary society. Having said that, however, given that Nasr’s work has a “metaphysical” nature, his writings, with few exceptions, are said to be demanding in terms of language, style, and expression, as well as of knowledge of other religions and philosophies, that they assume on the part of the ordinary reader.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/458	Samad, Abdus; Gardner, Norman D.; Cook, Bradley J.	Islamic Banking and Finance in Theory and Practice: The Experience of Malaysia and Bahrain	2005-04-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 22 No. 2 (2005): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 69-86	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v22i2.458	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/458/2251	This paper’s primary objective is to identify the relative importance of various Islamic financial products, in theory and in practice, by examining the financing records of the Bank Islam Malaysia (Berhad) and the Bahrain Islamic Bank. Currently, seven available Islamic financing products are considered viable alternatives to interest-based conventional contracts: mudarabah (trust financing), musharakah (equity financing), ijarah (lease financing), murabahah (trade financing), qard al-hassan (welfare loan), bay` bi al-thaman al-ajil (deferred payment financing), and istisna` (progressive payments). Among these financial products, mudarabah and musharakah are the most distinct. Their unique characteristics (at least in theory) make Islamic banks and Islamic financing viable alternatives to the conventional interest-based financial system. The question before us is to determine the extent of mudarabah and musharakah in Islamic financing in practice. The data are as follows: the average mudarabah is 5% of total financing, and the average musharakah is less than 3%. The combined average of mudarabah and musharakah for the two Islamic banks is less than 4% of the total finance and advances. The average qard al- hassan is about 4%, while istisna` does not yet exist in practice. Murabahah is the most popular and dominates all other modes of Islamic financing. The average use of murabahah is over 54%. When the bay` bi al-thaman al-ajil is added to the murabahah, the percentage of total financing is shown to be 2.68%. This paper also explores some possible reasons why these two Islamic banks appear to prefer murabahah to mudarabah and musharakah.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/459	Grundmann, Johannes	Shari`ah, Brain Death, and Organ Transplantation: The Context and Effect of Two Islamic Legal Decisions in the Near and Middle East	2005-10-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 22 No. 4 (2005): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 1-25	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v22i4.459	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/459/2220	Introduction In the early 1980s, comprehensive developments in the public health system as well as markedly improved possibilities for organ transplantation due to the introduction of immune suppressants,2 namely, the artificial prevention of organ rejection, led to a sudden expansion of transplantation medicine in the Near and Middle East. Long-term artificial respiration, along with improved and expanded intensive care units, enabled respiration and circulation to be maintained despite the partial or complete loss of brain function. This, in turn, secured the necessary blood supply to the organs until they could be removed. Against this backdrop, a comprehensive process of discussion on the factual connections between postmortem organ transplantation and the criterion for determining brain death developed.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/460	Hasan, Md. Mahmudul	The Orientalization of Gender	2005-10-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 22 No. 4 (2005): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 26-56	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v22i4.460	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/460/2221	Said’s critique of Orientalism provokes a comprehensive review by post-colonial theorists of the bulk of western knowledge regarding non-western countries. This Orientalist literature buttresses the colonial notion of a civilizing mission, which is also supported by many western feminists who provide theoretical grounds to such colonialist perceptions. Such post-colonial feminists as Gayatri Spivak, Chandra Mohanty, and Rajeswari Rajan analyze western feminism’s ideological complicity with Orientalist and imperialist ventures.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/461	Perley, David	Vagueness: An Additional Nuance in the Interpretation of Ibn `Arabi’s Mystical Language	2005-10-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 22 No. 4 (2005): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 57-83	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v22i4.461	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/461/2223	In the Sufi Ibn `Arabi’s mystical discourse, a performative “language of unsaying” is generated from the tensions and paradoxes that arise from the attempt to articulate the ineffable nature of a transcendent divine. However, such forms of language also occur in his attempts to articulate the elusive nature of the barzakh, an intermediate property of all existent things and beings. His use of language invokes not only issues of ineffability arising from a transcendent object, but also the dynamic relation between the ineffable and the intermediate. The analytical concept of “vagueness” helps to clarify such concepts as the barzakh by showing how these symbols are, relatively speaking, “precise” representations. Such a linguistic, philosophical knot is built into the mystical, pedagogical tradition of Ibn `Arabi’s Sufism, necessitating a distinction between how contemporary analytical philosophers and Sufi thinkers like him think about vagueness, while also emphasizing the sophisticated understanding of language at the heart of his Sufism.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/470	Correri, Nicole	Twelve Infallible Men: The Imams and the Making of Shi‘ism: Matthew Pierce Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. 272 pages.	2018-10-29	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 35 No. 4 (2018): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 56-59	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v35i4.470	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/470/189	Matthew Pierce’s first book, Twelve Infallible Men: The Imams and the Making of Shi‘ism, is a unique scholarly work about Ithnā Ash‘arī Shī‘ism and the development of communal identity. His main argument in this book is that the Shi‘a religious identity was shaped over time based on collective social memory and specific biographical depictions of spiritual leadership centered on the sacredness of the Prophet Muhammad and his family, the ahl al-bayt. While much scholarship on Shi‘ism is centered on the topics of succession, theological doctrines, or the specific rituals of ‘Ashura, Pierce focuses instead on how love and devotion towards the imams and the ahl al-bayt developed. His scholarly inquiry was piqued by his experience in the shrine city of Qum, Iran, where he was a resident and scholar of an inter-faith dialogue program from 2003-2006. There he observed firsthand the personal devotional lives of Twelver Shi‘as who cultivate personal connections and relationship with the imams through devotional ritual, seeking intercession, pilgrimages to shrines, mourning their suffering, and seeking their guidance. In Twelve Infallible Men this system of piety and devotion is traced to five early biographical figures. His primary source material was biographical works, in particular the five collective biographies of the imams written between 943-1150 CE: The Establishment of the Inheritance (Ithbāt al-waṣiya), attributed to al-Masʿūdī; Proofs of the Imamate (Dalāʾil al-imāma), attributed to Ibn Jarīr; The Book of Guidance (Kitāb al-irshād), by al-Mufīd; Informing Humanity (Iʿlām alwara), by al-Ṭabrīsī; and Virtues of the Descendants of Abū Ṭālib (Manāqib Āl Abī Ṭālib), by Ibn Shahrashub. Through his thematic and comparative analysis of these five sources Pierce traces the origin of communal remembrance and the Shi‘i system of piety utilizing the methodology of collective 57 memory studies. Throughout his text he notes broader religious rhetorical trends related to the geographic area and time period, such as the martyrdom narrative in early Christianity and the influence of miraculous stories to confirm saintly status, amongst others. In this way, Pierce situates the Shi‘i narrative within a wider milieu that speaks to sociological developments and broader religious experiences. The selected texts were all produced during the ‘Abbasid reign that was established by utilizing the legitimacy of ahl al-bayt as the source of proper Islamic leadership in their overthrow of the Umayyad regime. The ‘Abbasid era saw the development and emergence of Shi‘i scholarship and identity. Pierce could perhaps have given more historical context and analysis of anti-‘Alid sentiment (such as the institutionalized cursing of ‘Ali) during the Umayyad regime, as part of the development of sympathy and sorrow for the family of the Prophet. But one aspect of the Shi‘i narrative that Pierce analyzes in great depth throughout his work is the shared memory of suffering, primarily as demonstrated by the martyrdom of and the centrality of sorrow for the ahl al-bayt. In his analysis of narrative patterns and recurring symbols he is interested in revealing the needs of the believing community and what made these particular stories meaningful to them. The book is organized into five chapters. Crucial to this work is Pierce’s clarification of Sunni-Shi‘a disputes and the fluidity of how these identities developed and eventually solidified over time. He notes how this time period saw a variety of theological and jurisprudential debates, and the central aspects of what formalized into a Shi‘a identity, ritual, and concepts. The writings Pierce examines emerged during a period where Arabic literature was first taking shape and therefore demonstrate a process within the Islamic community at large of articulating specific narratives. The first chapter describes the canonization of the Twelve Infallibles. Pierce purposefully does not engage the polemics of the time, although these may have provided means to understand another facet of how the selected authors chose to craft their narrative. But he analyzes how the biographies of the imams became standardized over time—for example, how martyrdom was attributed to all of the imams after Mufīd’s writings and how Mufīd in particular set the standard for these narratives contributing to a coherent Shi‘a community with clear boundaries. In the second chapter Pierce explores the collective biographies’ central concern, namely the deaths of the Imams. Their tragic martyrdom becomes a theme in this genre of writing where suffering and grief comprise the proper Shi‘a response. Notably, Pierce also sheds light on the role of martyrdom in minority spiritual groups in the Near East. In this chapter Pierce also begins his gendered analysis, which is a highlight throughout the work, bringing in the tropes of the treacherous wife and the vulnerable bodies of the imams. These characterizations make the earlier narratives circulated, especially in Mufid’s writing, now unthinkable. Furthermore, emotional performances of grief and weeping emerge as demonstrations of piety, as well as being associated with political rebellion. Pierce explores how this emotional performance was in distinct contrast to the proto-Sunni traditionalists’ emphasis on controlling grief. The third chapter revolves around the themes of suffering and betrayal that permeate the biographies. Pierce investigates the arc of sacred history for Shi‘is as evidenced by their afflictions and the denial of their rights, which feature as central literary motifs in these primary sources, along with the symbols of suffering and outsiders. He discusses how the imams emerge as a distinctive type, as too do their betrayers. This chapter also features important events in Shi‘i history: the events of Ghadir and the martyrdom of Husayn in Karbala, a pivotal story in the Shi‘a community, but one that did not take central stage until later in these collective biographies. Love and devotion to the ahl al-bayt become salvific mechanisms that draw upon performances of mourning. Pierce also explores how religious ritual developed along with the narratives in the biographies. He continues his exploration of gender tropes where the female body is the site of mistrust and fear, specifically in the example of ‘A’isha. A central point of his book, elaborated in this chapter, is how the boundaries of the community were conceptually paired with the imams’ bodies. The fourth chapter is a systematic exploration of masculinity as revealed through the imams’ vulnerable bodies and the idealization of male performance. Pierce describes how masculine ideals as envisioned by the biographers comprise the concepts of virtue, manliness, and group loyalty. He explores how the narratives describe the physical appearance, miraculous achievements, and heroics of the imams. The importance of maleheirs, courage, strength, and skill in weaponry are all gendered themes of the imams as characterized in the biographies. Pierce analyzes how these qualities render claims of their legitimacy as leaders, observing how their portrayals also exemplify refinement and self-control. With the exposition of miraculous knowledge and actions, Pierce describes how the imams find victory in the spiritual realms while having experienced loss in the physical world. This chapter also features an important discussion of Fatima in the collective biographies and a fascinating and unique description of her pious female embodied performance sanitized of all female bodily imperfections (most specifically, blood). This last part of chapter four leads into the final chapter, which explores birth narratives in the collective biographies. These narratives form a unique center around which Shi‘is could celebrate and demonstrate communal devotion; it also established a divine ordainment through the transmission of prophetic light to the imams. Pierce explains that a unique aspect of Shi‘i hagiography is how the biographers labor to establish the imams’ mothers’ purity and chastity. His analysis of the sanitized bodies and bodily functions of these mothers is of particular interest. Part of the unique function of the imam is the transmission of his leadership to his successor and is revealed in the way in which the imams occlude the mothers in nurturing and caring for their newborn. These birth narratives underscore the Shi‘i claims of divinely appointed and rightful spiritual leaders, giving evidence to the community of believers that the imams were clearly designated from birth. Pierce effectively explores the Shi‘i community of memory and how these biographers established communal boundaries. His exploration of these primary sources with attention to literary analysis and genre specific themes and symbols is distinctive, and brings a different perspective into Islamic studies. Pierce’s analysis of gender ideals is also elucidating and could be explored more deeply in future work. It is also worth noting that within the body of the text, he predominantly references women scholars in his and related fields. Pierce successfully establishes the case for the crafting and defining of socio-religious Shi‘i identity via biographical texts whose key themes include loyalty, mourning, and justice for rightful heirs who were pure, ideal, and miraculous men. Nicole Correri, M.Ed., M.A.Hartford Seminary
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/472	Wani, Gowhar Quadir	Qur’anic Pictures of the Universe: The Scriptural Foundation of Islamic Cosmology: Osman Bakar Brunei, Darussalam: UBD Press; Malaysia: Islamic Book Trust, 2016. 223 pages.	2018-10-29	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 35 No. 4 (2018): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 62-62	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v35i4.472	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/472/190	The Qur’an, the divinely revealed scripture of Islam, is not merely a book of commandments and prohibitions. Rather, the bulk of the Qur’an is related to faith: divinely communicated answers to existential questions about the origin of life and universe, the place of humankind in the cosmos, the relation between human, cosmos, and Creator, and more. The Islamic viewpoint regarding the nature, origin, and destiny of the universe in relation with the Creator forms the subject matter of Islamic cosmology, and of this book.This book is part of the author’s larger, yet-unpublished project on the scientific exegesis of the Qur’an. Maintaining that the Qur’an presents multiple pictures of the universe, instead of a single monolithic picture, the author has divided the main content of the book into seven chapters among which the last five elaborate such “pictures”. These include the astronomical picture (chapter three), the architectural picture (chapter four), the picture of the cosmos as a divine kingdom (chapter five), the universe as a world of lights and darknesses (chapter six), and the human microcosm in the Qur’an (chapter seven). The first two chapters are concerned with Qur’anic definitions of the universe (chapter one) and an explanation for the multiplicity of Qur’anic pictures of the cosmos (chapter two). The book also includes an introduction, a bibliography (short but inclusive of the indispensable references), and a helpful index. The author’s method of arriving at a particular picture of the universe consists of a synthetic approach to the related verses dispersed in the different chapters of the Qur’an but unified thematically in a coherent way. The author himself argues that “the Qur’an features the Universe and its numerous pictures and images as one of its most attractive and interesting themes for human reflection and contemplation and scientific study” (4). Preferring the thematic and synthetic approach that is reflective of Islam’s holistic epistemology to the “piecemeal exegesis of one or two so-called cosmic or creation verses” as usually inspired by the reductionist epistemology of modern science, the author has blended revealed metaphysical data with empirical scientific data to portray different harmonious images of the universe. The author’s thematic engagement of the related Qur’anic verses and their synthesis into a coherent portrait of the Universe is intellectually stimulating and spiritually enlightening. In all this, the author has employed, as the central epistemological principle, the concept of “God’s Self Disclosure” as propounded by the celebrated esoteric exegete of Islam, Ibn ‘Arabi. According to this principle, the diversity in creation is actually reflective of God’s numerous attributes. Hence, the multiple pictures of the universe. In the first chapter of the book, the author elaborates Arabic terms (e.g., ‘ālamīn, khalq, kawn) used in the Qur’an in relation to the cosmos.The author engages their linguistic (lexical/semantic) details, their frequency in the Qur’an, and the relation between their first and last occurrence in the Qur’anic text. The chapter is loaded with insightful information on these verses from linguistic, thematic, and theological-philosophical perspectives; he seeks to arrive at metaphysical conclusions from etymological discussions, bridging a simple science with a complex one. In the following chapter, the author grapples with the cosmic unity in diversity, the multiple human visions of the universe despite its single divine vision, and the many subsystems of the universe (the angelic world, the human world, etc.) in order to justify the multiplicity of the Qur’anic pictures of the universe. In my humble opinion, this chapter is too short to satisfy this question; further, the reader may get confused regarding the relationship between the arguments and the conclusion. For example, while the author draws mainly on the Qur’anic word ‘ālamīn—interestingly, a morphological plural—to substantiate the multiplicity of the images of the universe in the Qur’an, he himself accepts that the Qur’an uses this word to mean the entire cosmos (27). The remaining five chapters of the book detail different Qur’anic terms and verses related to the cosmos, yielding the five “pictures” enumerated earlier. The discussion largely comprises thematic treatment of different related verses coupled with linguistic, theological/metaphysical, and scientific explanations. Yet what remains unanswered and intriguing is how far the Qur’anic pictures of the Universe correspond to modern scientific cosmology. What accounts for the Qur’anic style of allusive, cursory mentionof such cosmic terms? Are there layers of meaning in these verses which obtain variously for different audiences? How did the earlier generations of Muslims—especially the Companions of the Prophet, peace and blessings upon him—understand such verses? In sum, the book is a welcome contribution to the genre of scientific Qur’anic exegesis in general, and Qur’anic cosmology in particular. In my humble opinion, it is a must read for the students and scholars of Islamic Studies as well as those of other related fields. Gowhar Quadir WaniPhD candida Islamic Studies,ligarh Muslim University
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/474	Wani, Nazar Ul Islam	Pilgrimage in Islam: Traditional and Modern Practices: Sophia Rose Arjana London: Oneworld Publications, 2017. 288 pages.	2018-10-29	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 35 No. 4 (2018): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 62-64	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v35i4.474	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/474/191	Pilgrimage in Islam is a religious act wherein Muslims leave their homes and spaces and travel to another place, the nature, geography, and dispositions of which they are unfamiliar. They carry their luggage and belongings and leave their own spaces to receive the blessings of the dead, commemorate past events and places, and venerate the elect. In Pilgrimage in Islam, Sophia Rose Arjana writes that “intimacy with Allah is achievable in certain spaces, which is an important story of Islamic pilgrimage”. The devotional life unfolds in a spatial idiom. The introductory part of the book reflects on how pilgrimage in Islam is far more complex than the annual pilgrimage (ḥajj), which is one of the basic rites and obligations of Islam beside the formal profession of faith (kalima); prayers (ṣalāt); fasting (ṣawm); and almsgiving (zakāt). More pilgrims throng to Karbala, Iraq, on the Arbaeen pilgrimage than to Mecca on the Hajj, for example, but the former has received far less academic attention. The author expands her analytic scope to consider sites like Konya, Samarkand, Fez, and Bosnia, where Muslims travel to visit countless holy sites (mazarāt), graves, tombs, complexes, mosques, shrines, mountaintops, springs, and gardens to receive the blessings (baraka) of saints buried there. She reflects on broader methodological and theoretical questions—how do we define religion?—through the diversity of Islamic traditions about pilgrimage. Arjana writes that in pilgrimage—something which creates spaces and dispositions—Muslim journeys cross sectarian boundaries, incorporate non-Muslim rituals, and involve numerous communities, languages, and traditions (the merging of Shia, Sunni, and Sufi categories) even to “engende[r] a syncretic tradition”. This approach stands against the simplistic scholarship on “pilgrimage in Islam”, which recourses back to the story of the Hajj. Instead, Arjana borrows a notion of ‘replacement hajjs’ from the German orientalist Annemarie Schimmel, to argue that ziyārat is neither a sectarian practice nor antithetical to Hajj. In the first chapter, Arjana presents “pilgrimage in Islam” as an open, demonstrative and communicative category. The extensive nature of the ‘pilgrimage’ genre is presented through documenting spaces and sites, geographies, and imaginations, and is visualized through architectural designs and structures related to ziyārat, like those named qubba, mazār (shrine), qabr (tomb), darih (cenotaph), mashhad (site of martyrdom), and maqām (place of a holy person). In the second chapter, the author continues the theme of visiting sacred pilgrimage sites like “nascent Jerusalem”, Mecca, and Medina. Jerusalem offers dozens of cases of the ‘veneration of the dead’ (historically and archaeologically) which, according to Arjana, characterizes much of Islamic pilgrimage. The third chapter explains rituals, beliefs, and miracles associated with the venerated bodies of the dead, including Karbala (commemorating the death of Hussein in 680 CE), ‘Alawi pilgrimage, and pilgrimage to Hadrat Khidr, which blur sectarian lines of affiliation. Such Islamic pilgrimage is marked by inclusiveness and cohabitation. The fourth chapter engages dreams, miracles, magical occurrences, folk stories, and experiences of clairvoyance (firāsat) and the blessings attached to a particular saint or walī (“friend of God”). This makes the theme of pilgrimage “fluid, dynamic and multi-dimensional,” as shown in Javanese (Indonesian) pilgrimage where tradition is associated with Islam but involves Hindu, Buddhist and animistic elements. This chapter cites numerous sites that offer fluid spaces for the expression of different identities, the practice of distinct rituals, and cohabitation of different religious communities through the idea of “shared pilgrimage”. The fifth and final chapter shows how technologies and economies inflect pilgrimage. Arjana discusses the commodification of “religious personalities, traditions and places” and the mass production of transnational pilgrimage souvenirs, in order to focus on the changing nature of Islamic pilgrimage in the modern world through “capitalism, mobility and tech nology”. The massive changes wrought by technological developments are evident even from the profusion of representations of Hajj, as through pilgrims’ photos, blogs, and other efforts at self documentation. The symbolic representation of the dead through souvenirs makes the theme of pilgrimage more complex. Interestingly, she then notes how “virtual pilgrimage” or “cyber-pilgrimage” forms a part of Islamic pilgrimage in our times, amplifying how pilgrimage itself is a wide range of “active, ongoing, dynamic rituals, traditions and performances that involve material religions and imaginative formations and spaces.” Analyzing religious texts alone will not yield an adequate picture of pilgrimage in Islam, Arjana concludes. Rather one must consider texts alongside beliefs, rituals, bodies, objects, relationships, maps, personalities, and emotions. The book takes no normative position on whether the ziyāratvisitation is in fact a bid‘ah (heretical innovation), as certain Muslim orthodoxies have argued. The author invokes Shahab Ahmad’s account of how aspects of Muslim culture and history are seen as lying outside Islam, even though “not everything Muslims do is Islam, but every Muslim expression of meaning must be constituting in Islam in some way”. The book is a solid contribution to the field of pilgrimage and Islamic studies, and the author’s own travels and visits to the pilgrimage sites make it a practicalcontribution to religious studies. Nazar Ul Islam Wani, PhDAssistant Professor, Department of Higher EducationJammu and Kashmir, India
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/475	Perez, Shelby	Palestine…It Is Something Colonial: Hatem Bazian The Hague: Amrit Publishers, 2016. 327 pages.	2018-10-29	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 35 No. 4 (2018): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 64-67	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v35i4.475	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/475/192	The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has not existed since the beginning of time. Hatem Bazian explores the roots of the conflict, locating the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project under the tutelage of British colonial efforts. Bazian’s text is a look at and beyond first-hand accounts, an investigation of and critical analysis of settler practice in relation to similar texts such as Sari Nusseibeh’s Once Upon a Country: A Palestinian Life, Alan Dowty’s Israel/Palestine, and Ari Shavit’s My Promised Land. Hatem Bazian’s Palestine…it is something colonial is not an introduction to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Readers should possess a basic understanding of the conflict and history of the region over the last century. Nor does this text provide the reader with an unbiased look at the timeline of events since the inception of the Zionist movement. Palestine…it is something colonial instead is a rich critique of the Zionist movement and British colonialism. It investigates the way British colonialism influenced Zionism and how Zionism adopted colonial ideas and practices. Bazian locates Zionism as a settler colonialist movement still at work today, which historically planned and systematically executed the removal of Palestinians from their land, with the aid of the United Kingdom and (later) the United States. Bazian examines Ottoman collapse, the colonization of Palestine by the British, Israel’s biblical theology of dispossession, as well as British colonial incubation of Zionism, Zionism as a Eurocentric episteme, the building of Israel through ethnic cleansing, and the Nakba, all of these culminating in legalized dispossession. Throughout the text, Bazian is able to tie each chapter to the present state of affairs and remind the audience of the trauma of a people forcibly removed. Bazian opens with the straightforward assertion that “Palestine is the last settler-colonial project to be commissioned in the late 19th early 20th centuries and still unfolding in the 21st century with no end in sight” (17). In chapter one, “Dissecting the Ottomans and Colonizing Palestine,” Bazian navigates the biased historiography of the fall of the Ottoman empire, linking the collapse of the empire to the colonizing forces of Europe which sought to ensure access to the newly discovered oil in the region as well as to Asia and Africa. Bazian masterfully steers the reader through the history of European intervention, and in particular on behalf of Christians as ethnic minorities in the Middle East. Europe is historically anti-Jewish; at the turn of the century, Zionism was determined to solve Europe’s “Jewish Problem” and maintain a stronghold in the Middle East, he writes. In chapter two, “Israel’s Biblical Theology of Dispossession,” Bazian explores the biblical roots of Zionist ideology. The chapter opens with a discussion of a contemporary Bedouin tribe being expelled in the Negev. Bazian writes that “the biblical text gets transformed into policy by the Zionist state, by which it then normalizes or makes legal the wholesale theft of Palestinian lands and expulsion of the population”(57) using legal documents such as the Levy Report. These policies create “facts on the ground” which lead to “legalized expulsions.” The Bible was central to the historical development of the European Christian supremacist idea of the Holy Land. The loss of the territory conquered during the Crusades ruptured this notion, a break “fixed” through Zionism. In chapter three, “British Colonialism and Incubation of Zionism,”Bazian begins to address British colonialism and Zionism as complementary. Bazian uses primary texts from British political actors of the time, such as Lord Robert Cecil and Lord Balfour, to establish the anti-Semiticinspiration for British actions of the time. Bazian also successfully uses the Hussein-McMahon Correspondence and the Sykes-Picot agreement to establish the double dealings of the British in the Middle East in the early twentieth century. Bazian uses many primary texts in this chapter effectively, though their organization could leave readers confused. Chapter four, “Zionism: Eurocentric Colonial Epistemic,” continues the themes of the prior chapter as the colonial influence is cemented. In this chapter, Bazian explores the subterfuge and the genius propaganda selling Palestine as “a land without a people for a people without a land” along with “making the desert bloom”—as if the indigenous Arab people were not there. Bazian frames this chapter within the Zionist ideology of the peoples living in the land being only a barrier to a Jewish state in Palestine. Bazian uses primary sources (e.g., Herzl) to defend the assertion that the removal of the Palestinian people was always a piece of the Zionist plan. Bazian also includes Jewish critical voices (e.g., excerpts from the reporter Ella Shohat) to establish the European Jewish bias against the indigenous Arab peoples, including Sephardic Jews. Bazian that these biases and the effort to remove Palestinians from their land defined the early Zionist movement and the creation of the state of Israel in chapter five, “Building a State and Ethnic Cleansing.” This chapter draws extensively on primary sources: correspondence, reports, declarations, agreements, commissions, and maps. Bazian struggles to organize these rich resources in a clear fashion; however, his analysis matches the richness of the sources. These sources establish the “legalized” systematic removal of the Palestinians from the land by the Israelis in 1948. In chapter six, “The Nakba,” Bazian uses further legal documents and first-hand accounts to trace the forced removal of Palestinians. He pays homage to the trauma while critically dissecting the process of legalizing ethnic cleansing and peddling the innocence of the Israelis to the rest of the world. Bazian profoundly concludes his chapter with the story of a Palestinian boy who witnessed the mass executions of men and women of his village and marched away from his home. The boy, now a man, closed his story with poignant words that capture the horror of the Nakba: “The road to Ramallah had become an open cemetery” (241). After the land was emptied the new state of Israel needed to legally take possession of the Palestinian-owned property. Chapter seven, “Colonial Machination,” elaborates this process: “the State of Israel is structured to give maximum attention to fulfillment of the settler-colonial project and the state apparatus is directed toward achieving this criminal enterprise” (243). The name “Palestine” is erased as a name for the land and the peoples; former colonial and Ottoman laws were twisted to support a systematic theft of the land. Bazian concludes his book with a look to the future: “What is the way forward and Palestine’s de-colonial horizon?” (276). He lays out the options available for true and lasting peace, discounting out of hand the twostate solution as impossible due to the extent of the settlements in the West Bank. He also dismisses both the options of the removal of Palestinians and the removal of the Jewish people. He instead posits a way forward through a one-state solution, leaving how this is to be done to the reader and the people of Israel/Palestine to determine. Bazian has contributed a full-bodied analysis of primary sources to defend his assertion that Zionism has always been a settler colonial movement with its goal being a land devoid of the indigenous people. The organization of the text, the lack of sectioning in the chapters, and the technical insertion and citation of primary sources could be improved for clearer reading. Bazian thoroughly defends his thesis with tangible evidence that Zionism is something colonial, and has been something colonial from the start. This is a text that complicates the narrative of what colonialism is, what the State of Israel is, and who and what Palestine is, together establishing the book as required reading for understanding nuances of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Shelby Perez Master’s Divinity Candidate Chicago Theological Seminary
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/476	Haqqani, Shehnaz	Women in the Qur’an: An Emancipatory Reading: Asma Lamrabet Translated fr m the French by Myriam Francois-Cerrah. Square View, 2016. 172 pages.	2018-10-29	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 35 No. 4 (2018): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 68-71	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v35i4.476	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/476/193	Asma Lamrabet’s Women in the Qur’an: An Emancipatory Reading sufficiently fulfills its promise to offer an emancipatory approach to the Qur’an. It argues for a re-reading of the entire Islamic tradition, not the Qur’an alone, in a way that embraces women’s full humanity. Despite some of its less convincing arguments, its overall thesis of women’s liberation through the Qur’an and its argument that the Qur’an is in fact anti-patriarchal are well-presented. The book contains an Introduction and two sections. The Introduction offers a vision standing between the conservative Islamic and the western Islamophobic approaches. Unlike these two approaches, which each deem the Muslim woman voiceless, Lamrabet’s method empowers Muslim women through a reclamation of their original, Qur’anic status. Part One, “When the Qur’an Speaks of Women,” offers alternative readings of Qur’anic narratives that involve women, such as Balqis, Zulaykha, Asiya the Pharaoh’s wife, Maryam, Sarah, and Hagar. It also includes those women whose stories the tradition neglects, such as Moses’ mother and Shu‘ayb’s daughter. This section illustrates the impact of a story about a woman that is actually centered on her, unlike in the traditional versions. A fascinating discussion here is about Balqis, whose honorific treatment in the Qur’an troubled male scholars. It was so unimaginable for them to view a woman as a revered queen that they questioned her human origin. Some concluded that she must have been of jinn ancestry; others derided the men of her kingdom for “allowing themselves to be governed” by an iljatu, a derogatory term meaning “donkey” or “disbeliever” (33). This attitude diminishes Balkis’s humanity; through it, the commentators could “rest assured” that they need not take her seriously since she is only half human. Part Two, “When the Qur’an Speaks to Women,” challenges the claim that the language of the Qur’an is masculine. Lamrabet discusses the women who complained that the Qur’an does not address them (e.g., Umm Salama, Asma bint Umays, and Umm ‘Umarah al-Ansariyyah). While she argues that the issue was resolved with the revelation of Q 33:35, even this verse does not directly speak to women, as the Qur’an often does with men (e.g., Q 2:221; 2:223; 4:34). Still, God’s response to women’s concerns and grievances, as in the examples of the above women and Khawla bint Tha‘laba (132), speaks to the Qur’an’s anti-patriarchal voice. By devoting verses to Khawla’s concern about her husband’s exploitation of her through ẓihār (Q 58:1-2), the Qur’an endorses women’s moral courage to protest oppression. Lamrabet continues her discussion by addressing four issues commonly invoked to prove Islam’s misogyny: polygyny, inheritance, testimony, and permission to men to hit their wives. On polygyny, Lamrabet emphasizes that the Qur’an discourages it by requiring equal treatment of all wives while simultaneously reminding men that they can never be just to multiple wives. Ineffectively, to show that the prophetic model discouraged polygamy, Lamrabet asks, “did the Prophet not express his strong disapproval of polygamy when he learned that ‘Ali, husband to his daughter Fatima Zahra, wished to marry a second wife?” (144). Since the Prophet himself had even more than the number of wives the Qur’an “limits” other Muslim men to, this is not a convincing argument. On female testimony, Lamrabet argues that the verse on testimony (Q 2:282) which seemingly treats women unequally is about attestation, not testimony, and that it carries no legislative remit. While a testimony occurs in front of a judge who decides upon the veracity of the claims, attestation refers to a case between two people (145). She argues that this verse in fact advocates women’s participation in spaces viewed strictly as men’s, such as the management of commercial affairs. She invokes Q 24:6-8, where “the testimony of a woman is absolutely equal to that of a man”—although in this verse, the wife’s testimony in fact overshadows the husband’s. Moreover, in the transmission of hadith, which is also a form of testimony, women’s and men’s testimony is treated equally. On inheritance, Lamrabet again calls for a context-based meaning of the verses—i.e., in seventh-century Arabia, women were not expected to inherit anything. She notes that the presumed unequal distribution refers only to the inheritance of sisters and brothers, not all women and men. In fact, there are cases where a man inherits and the woman does not, where the woman inherits and the man does not, or one inherits more than the other regardless of gender but due to their closeness of kinship to the deceased (150). Her justifications are not always convincing, however: explaining why husbands receive a higher portion because of their role as financial providers, she writes that it is “to give men a sense of responsibility because women might find themselves unable to manage the economic needs of the family due to pregnancy” (150). References to women’s pregnancy as explanatory of their roles and rights are always intriguing, given that pregnancy is not women’s default position. This rule appears to be justified with exceptions treated as the norm. However, unlike most other scholars speaking on inheritance, who seldom recognize lived realities that require women to work, Lamrabet does address reality and condemns the “blind application” of Islamic principles. The author’s approach to Q 4:34 (on wife-beating) is largely unpersuasive, except her claim that ḍaraba has been mistranslated. Her reading relies on the assumption that pre-Islamic Arab men mistreated their women to such an extent that Q 4:34’s permission to discipline their wives “through a gradual process” is in fact justice towards women. Lamrabet explains that the reason the Prophet was corrected when he instructed a woman to hit her husband in retaliation is that men complained to the Prophet that their wives would all rebel against them. That is, a woman’s self-defense would lead to a social revolt, and to prevent this, husbands’ right as disciplinarians was protected. Lamrabet claims that scholars have “unanimously” prohibited “all violence against women” (157); this is inaccurate, as a historical exegetical study of Q 4:34 shows (see Ayesha Chaudhry’s scholarship). Lamrabet argues that ḍaraba in this verse does not mean “to hit.” She notes that the term appears multiple times in the Qur’an, where its meanings include “to cover,” “to go away from,” “to strike,” and “to accompany.” She questions the scholars’ choice to interpret it as “to beat” when several other meanings would have worked both contextually and in light of the Qur’an’s message of compassion. In the Conclusion, Lamrabet discusses Muslim women’s interrupted revolution in the early days of Islam. While women were initially condemning the patriarchy of their time, their contributions and concerns were later subverted through various processes as was the spirit of liberation that Islam brought, normalizing misogynistic interpretations of the Qur’an. An addendum to the book, a “Publisher’s End Notes,” explains—or likely mansplains—some of Lamrabet’s ideas. It is unclear which points the publisher is responding to. E.g., Point F states, “No source is provided for this claim” without referencing said claim. Erroneous statements appear elsewhere, such as Point E: “In the Islamic tradition, women have never been regarded as inferior creatures.” Historical scholars did in fact view women as inferiors, and Lamrabet provides many such examples (e.g., 15, 25). The publisher’s notes intend to “correct” Lamrabet’s assertions through patronizing and dismissive comments such as “this may be based on her experience” and “the author’s discomfort appears to be based on a misunderstanding of the verses.” Since the publisher’s lack of research on the subject is clear, their claims that they could not find any support for Lamrabet’s statements are unreliable. Like any valuable scholarship, the book contains flaws, of which a significant one is the lack of citation of women’s scholarship. Ironically, while challenging the patriarchy of denying women’s contributions to Islam, Lamrabet herself hardly cites Muslim women, although she frequently cites past and contemporary men. She is clearly familiar with Muslim women’s scholarship, as she notes earlier in the book (5). Among the scholars whose works should have been engaged are Fatima Sadiqi, Olfa Youssef, and Fatima Mernissi, among others who have written extensively in Arabic and/ or French on issues that Lamrabet highlights. Also, the translator, Myriam Francois-Cerrah, uses the outdated term “mankind” for “humanity” and “man” for “humans” or “people” (e.g., 32). Finally, like apologist scholarshipon women and Islam, the book offers a reductive portrayal of pre-Islamic Arab women’s rights, which were purportedly non-existent and improved dramatically with the advent of Islam. Suitable for various audiences, particularly in Islamic Studies and Women’s Studies, the book is a conversation with practicing Muslims—who can appreciate its faith-based approach. The translator has done an immense service by expanding the book’s audience. Lamrabet’s book is also commendable for its accessibility to non-academic audiences. Moreover, mainstream Muslim scholars and preachers of Islam will benefit from the non-traditional, non-orthodox interpretations of women-centered verses of the Qur’an that have historically privileged male perspectives and interests. Shehnaz HaqqaniDiversity Scholar FellowWomen’s and Gender StudiesIthaca College
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/477	Marthinsen, Grant	Turkey’s July 15th Coup: What Happened and Why: M. Hakan Yavuz and Bayram Balci, eds. Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, 2018. 360 pages.	2018-10-29	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 35 No. 4 (2018): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 72-75	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v35i4.477	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/477/194	This book is a collection of essays written by a variety of experts on Turkey and social movements and provides a critical analysis of the role of the Gülen Movement (GM)—or Hizmet (“service”), as it is referred to by its adherents—in the coup attempt which was undertaken by one or more factions of the Turkish armed forces in July 2016. Edited and contributed to by M. Hakan Yavuz and Bayram Balci, this work began at a conference in October of 2016, where these experts gathered to discuss the coup itself as well as its implications and ramifications. The chapters in the book all build off of each other to some degree, with earlier chapters covering the history of the GM and the ways in which it has acquired influence both in Turkey and abroad; the coup and structural factors both within Turkish society; and the GM alliance with the Justice and Development Party (AKP) led by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the current president of Turkey. Later chapters expand in scope, covering the foreign policy implications of the coup both for Turkey and the United States, where Fethullah Gülen, the eponymous leader of the movement, resides today. Several chapters engage the state of the scholarship on the GM itself, effectively unpacking the ways in which the organization has actively co-opted academia by offering paid trips to Turkey, publishing non-peer-reviewed material, and funding conferences which avoid critical analysis of the GM. In the introduction Balci and Yavuz discuss the history of the Turkish state, giving particular focus to the place of religion under Kemal Atatürk; the pair discusses how the Turkish concept of secularism hews much more closely to the Jacobin tradition than the Anglo-American understanding. This is quite important as the alliance between the AKP and the GM (following Turkish elections in 2002 wherein the AKP swept to power) rested on a shared desire to overthrow the Kemalist conception of secularism, which seeks to dominate religion and prevent its expression in the public sphere. The book’s first chapter, written by Yavuz, charts the GM’s development over time, enumerating three key stages in its history. The first was that of a loosely bound religious network, encouraged by their leader to do good works; the second marked the expansion of the GM both within and outside of Turkey as an education-providing and media powerhouse; the third saw the GM create a parallel state structure in Turkey, which was mobilized to further increase the movement’s power throughout the 2000s and this current decade, most famously during the coup itself, though a variety of other incidents are discussed here and throughout the book. The next chapter details the coup itself, giving background which is necessary to understand the rest of the work and underlining four key junctures which put Turkey on the path to the July 15th event. The chapter’s author, Mujeeb R. Khan, notes that the structure of Turkish institutions (particularly its version of secularism), the continued domination of the Turkish deep state following the introduction of multi-party elections several decades ago, the neo-liberal opening Turkey experienced in the 1980s, and the rise of the AKP in the early 2000s all played integral roles in the rise of the GM and, eventually, the coup. Yavuz collaborated with Rasim Koç to write the third chapter, which examines the relationship between the GM and Erdoğan’s AKP (beginning with the unspoken alliance between the two which started after AKP’s 2002 electoral victory and whose disintegration led to the coup) as well as foreign policy consequences it had for Turkey. Chapters 4 and 5, written by Michael A. Reynolds and Kiliç Kanat, examine the coup, including the factors and events which led to both its occurrence and its failure. Kanat’s examination of why the coup failed is particularly interesting; he compares and contrasts the failure with previous successful coups which occurred in Turkey during the mid- to late-twentieth century. The next chapter, written by Caroline Tee, returns specifically to the topic of the AKP-GM relationship, digging deeply into the events which caused what on the surface seemed like a natural alliance to fracture and, during 2016, turn upon itself. Sabine Dreher’s chapter follows Tee’s, and is one of the most theoretical in the book, as it places the GM in the contexts of neoliberal and globalist theory, and notes internal contradictions within the movement itself. She considers how the global goals of the organization—the eradication of ignorance through educational work, the alleviation of poverty through private enterprise run by movement members, and the hosting of intercultural and interfaith dialogue— stand at odds with the nationalist project of the GM in Turkey, where movement members attempted to seize control of the state they had been infiltrating for some time as opposed to working outside of it. Balci wrote the eighth chapter, which deals with the GM movement’s presence in former Soviet satellites, namely Georgia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. Following the coup attempt in 2016, the Turkish government pressured all of these states to shut down any GM movement activities within their countries, which was difficult as the GM provided excellent education to the children of elites in these nations. He then charts the differing reactions of the states mentioned above. The ninth chapter, by David Tittensor, turns to the structure of the GM and how secrecy and hierarchy play crucial roles in it, a reality which is often denied by the majority of scholarship—though he and other contributors to the work might dispute the use of the term “scholarship”, or at least qualify it. He does end his chapter with a criticism of the theory that GM members were key leaders of the coup, a conclusion which is at odds with that of most other contributors to the volume. The tenth chapter, by Yavuz Çobanoĝlu, provides insight into the role of women in the GM, criticizing some of Gülen’s writings and detailing the experiences of female students living in GM dormitories in Turkey, an experience that many of the women surveyed found to be repressive. Kristina Dohrn’s contribution outlines the activities and role of the GM movement in Tanzania, which, similar to Balci’s chapter, deals with repercussions of the coup and examines potential paths forward for the GM outside of Turkey. The work’s final chapter, written by Joshua Hendrick, is about how the GM presented itself as a “good” Islam in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, during a period in which the West writ large was searching for a “modern” version of the religion which it could champion in opposition to extremism. He effectively critiques the idea that religion itself can be good or bad, and rightly puts the onus on the actors themselves. The book ends with a postscript which examines the four major theories about how the coup may have come to pass, and comes to the conclusion that GM members were central and sole actors in the coup, which was in all likelihood approved by Gülen himself. This work does an excellent job of unpacking the GM and its various religious and political facets, even for the relatively uninitiated reader, and pushes back strongly against what it identifies as the prevailing anti-Erdoĝan Western narratives about the coup, which try to shift blame away from the GM and onto the shoulders of other actors, including the AKP leader. Particularly interesting is the book’s criticism of GM-sponsored scholarship, which is cited as one of the primary ways in which the GM has ingratiated itself worldwide, as it frames the group as “good” Islam. The work refrains from being speculative but does examine possible futures for the GM, mostly outside of Turkey, as the country’s government has gone to extreme lengths to uproot the movement in its homeland—lengths that the authors do rightly criticize as going too far, if somewhat tepidly at times. The US-Turkey relationship as it relates to the GM issue, specifically hisresidence in the US, is also examined in some depth and leads a student of either Islam in the US or the country’s politics to wonder if the GM has successfully insinuated itself into any institutions here, as it has done in Turkey. The author of this review once believed that Erdoĝan may have permitted or even been behind the coup attempt as a vehicle to consolidate power, but the evidence and arguments presented by the authors of this work have swayed his point of view; the GM was almost certainly responsible for the coup attempt, and it seems likely that Gülen himself gave his blessing to the members of his movement who carried it out. Grant MarthinsenMA, Center for Contemporary Arab StudiesGeorgetown University
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/478	Andersson, Tobias	The Works of Ibn Wāḍiḥ al-Yaʿqūbī (Volume 1): Matthew S. Gordon, Chase F. Robinson, Everett K. Rowson, and Michael Fishbein, eds. Boston: Brill, 2017. 260 pages.	2018-10-29	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 35 No. 4 (2018): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 75-78	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v35i4.478	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/478/195	Following the monumental translation project of al-Ṭabarī’s History (40 vols., Albany: SUNY Press), completed in 2007, the editors of this three-vol- ume work have supervised the translation of the writings of another im- portant early historian: Ibn Wāḍiḥ al-Yaʿqūbī (d. shortly after 295/908). It contains fully annotated translations of al-Yaʿqūbī’s History (Tārīkh), his Geography (Kitāb al-buldān), his short political essay The Book of the Adap- tion of Men to Their Time and Their Dominant Characteristics in Every Age (Mushākalat al-nās li-zamānihim wa-mā yaghlibu ʿalayhim fī kull ʿaṣr) and a few fragmentary texts found in other pre-modern Arabic works. The first volume (the subject of this review) contains The Adaption of Men, The Ge- ography, and the fragmentary texts, while the latter two volumes contain The History divided into two parts. Because of their early date and richness of information on a wide range of historical subjects, al-Yaʿqūbī’s works are important sources to consider for anyone interested in early Islamic history and the historical tradition that developed in the first centuries AH. That was also, as stated in the introduction, the main reason for this translation project that took over two decades to complete. In the first introductory chapter (1:1-8), Matthew S. Gordon makes clear that the translation project sought to address two main groups of readers: (1) “scholars in related fields who, in most cases, are unable to read al-Yaʿqūbī in the original Arabic” and (2) “students of early Near Eastern and Islamic history” (1:2). These are important clarifications and answers to the question that might otherwise arise: What is the use of translating these rather specialized Arabic texts into English? One answer is, as Gor- don points out, that they are useful to scholars in related fields. In the case of al-Yaʿqūbī, considering his broad interests as a historian and geographer, the translation of his works will be particularly useful for historians of Late Antiquity from outside the field of Arabic and Islamic studies. Another answer would be, as also pointed out, that they are useful for undergradu- ate and graduate students of Islamic history, as well as teachers and course organizers, who usually have to rely on texts in translation. A third answer that is not explored in the introduction—except perhaps alluded to in the reference to the translation of al-Ṭabarī’s History as an “invaluable resource for scholars and students alike” (1:2)—is that critical and fully-annotat- ed translations of classical works may function as “commentaries” on the original Arabic texts and can thus be useful to scholars who are capable of reading the original texts. This is, for example, how the translation of al- Ṭabarī’s History has often been used; scholars may (or rather should) read the text in the original Arabic, but for clarifications of difficult passages, meanings of certain words in context or questions how to translate terms or passages, they may consult the critical and annotated translations. Gordon’s introduction briefly introduces al-Yaʿqūbī and his three surviving works, noting their general content, some of their characteristics and, especially in relation to The History, al-Yaʿqūbī’s Shīʿī views and his “Shiʿite reading of Islamic history” (1:5). The introduction is useful in what it contains, but would have benefitted from a more thorough discussion of how al-Yaʿqūbī worked as a historian and geographer—including subjects such as his intel- lectual context, audience, sources, methods of compilation, and historical views. Instead, it is simply noted that some of these topics “deserve further investigation” (1:6). The second introductory chapter contains a “biographical sketch” of al-Yaʿqūbī by Sean Anthony and Matthew S. Gordon (1:9-22). Despite the scarcity of biographical information (“there is little that can be known for certain about al-Yaʿqūbī and his life,” 1:10), Anthony and Gordon provide a useful summary of what we can know about him, based on a few accounts of other historians who cite his works and what might be inferred from his own writings: his hardline Shīʿism, the works he compiled, the approxi- mate date of his death (shortly after 295/908), his many travels, some of the places in which he lived from al-Fusṭāṭ to Iṣfahān, his links to certain dynasties (Ṭāhirids in Iran and Ṭūlūnids in Egypt), his involvement in the bureaucratic circles of the ʿAbbāsid era and his particular attachment to, and historical interest in, the ʿAbbāsid dynasty. Either here or in the first introductory chapter, however, a lot more could be said about al-Yaʿqūbī as a historian and a geographer; after all, what we really know about him and have access to is the results of his historical and geographical writings: The History and The Geography. The third and final introductory chapter, by Everett K. Rowson, out- lines the manuscripts, printed editions and translations of al-Yaʿqūbī’s three works (1:23–27). Rowson notes “that three of al-Yaʿqūbī’s works have been preserved, although not in optimal form, and that they have received con- siderable scholarly attention” (23). Most of the discussion pertains to The History. He points out that there are two more or less identical surviving manuscripts of The History, one of which is based on the other. The stan- dard and “only respectable” Arabic edition of the text (ed. M. Th. Houtsma, 2 vols., Leiden: Brill, 1883) is based on the later of the two manuscripts, while the translators in this project have prioritized the earlier one as the “only independent source for text readings” and mainly used the later copy (including Houtsma’s published edition) for interpretations of words and phrases that are hard to read. This raises the question if it would not have been a good idea to provide a critical edition of the Arabic text before a translation (of the manuscript text) into English; after all, a new critical and accessible edition of the original Arabic text is needed in the field. However, it is possible that such a project of re-editing al-Yaʿqūbī’s History is already underway, which would make this question unnecessary. The first of the three volumes contains the translation of The Adap- tion of Men (31-60, trans. Michael Fishbein), The Geography (64-199, trans. Elton Daniel and Paul M. Cobb), and some fragmentary texts (203-34, trans. Cobb, Gordon and Fishbein). The first is a short political essay com- prised of chronologically arranged anecdotes about the caliphs—begin- ning with Abū Bakr (r. 11-13/632-4) and ending with al-Muʿtaḍid (r. 279- 89/892-902)—and examples of how the people of their times, according to al-Yaʿqūbī, tended to follow them in their conduct and tastes. Fishbein’s translation is clear and the annotation is very informative, essentially functioning as a useful commentary with information about mentioned indi- viduals, places, and events as well as clarifications of terms and difficult passages. It is interesting to note that al-Yaʿqūbī’s image of the first three caliphs is surprisingly positive for a “hardline” Shīʿī historian—Abū Bakr, for example, is described as “the most abstemious of men, the most humble and sparing in his clothing” and ʿUmar, among other things, as “strict in matters relating to God” (31-33)—which might illustrate the difficulty of categorizing al-Yaʿqūbī’s Shiʿism. The second translated text is The Geography, which, as Gordon notes, is a book of “administrative geography” that al-Yaʿqūbī seems to have com- piled in order to “provide his fellow regional functionaries with the kind of information required to carry out their administrative duties” (6). It con- tains descriptions of the major towns and cities in the Muslim world of al-Yaʿqūbī’s time and information about practical matters such as distanc- es, agriculture, crafts, products, successions of governors, and the religious and ethnic composition of the local populations. The translation is clear and very readable, despite the sometimes difficult terminology and numer- ous place names, and the annotation is extensive and useful. Altogether, this translation of al-Yaʿqūbī’s works is a very welcomed addition to the field of early Islamic history and historiography, comparable in this respect to the translation of al-Ṭabarī’s History, which has proven its importance for both students and scholars. Similar to that project, the translations of al- Yaʿqūbī’s writings are carried out by twelve specialists in the field, which is evident from the translated texts as well as the accompanying annotations and the concise but useful introductory material. One does, however, hope that the translations will be complemented by new critical editions of the Arabic texts, at least in the case of The History, and new detailed historio- graphical studies on al-Yaʿqūbī as a historian and as a geographer. Tobias Andersson Faculty Member Department of Theology Uppsala University 
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/479	Omar, Ameen	The Fatimids: The Rise of a Muslim Empire: Shainool Jiwa London, England: I.B Tauris Publishers, 2018. 160 pages.	2018-10-29	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 35 No. 4 (2018): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 79-83	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v35i4.479	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/479/196	Shainool Jiwa’s The Rise of a Muslim Empire is a two-volume historical work on the legacy of the Fatimid Empire. The first volume surveys the religious and sociopolitical underpinnings of Fatimid rule from its North African establishment in 909 to its transition to Egypt in 969. Jiwa’s second vol- ume focuses on the pinnacle of Fatimid society up until its decline from 969-1171. This review pertains to the first of the two volumes. Working within this phase, Jiwa details the reigns of the first four Imams: ‘Abd Allāh al-Mahdī, Abū’l-Qāsim Muḥammad, Ismāʿīl al-Manṣūr, and al-Muʿizz li- Dīn Allāh. The second book, which is titled The Fatimid Rule from Egypt, discusses the latter ten Imams (4). The first chapter covers the origins of the Fatimids in respect to both religious and geographical contexts. Jiwa starts by providing the historical background of Ismaili Shiism. Here, everything from the succession crisis of 632 CE to the emergence of the different strands of Shiism are discussed. Jiwa describes the Ismaili sect as having held Ismāʿīl, the eldest son of Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq, to have been the chosen successor of his father, therefore mak- ing him Imam. Ismāʿīl’s ephemeral mortality caused for the Imamate to then pass over to his young son, Muḥammad b. Ismāʿīl, eponym of the sect (10). The Twelvers are described as having believed in the Imamate of Jaʿfar’s youngest son, Mūsā, whose lineage gives root to the Imams of Twelver Shiism. Jiwa characterizes Ismaili beliefs as having rested on dawr al-satr (period of concealment) and daʿwa (religio-political mission) (11). The dawr al-satr refers to the Imams going into hiding with only their most trusted followers knowing their true identities. Subsequently, these follow- ers promoted the recognition of these hidden Imams, which in large part refers to daʿwa (the act of inviting). Jiwa explains that during dawr al-satr (765–909 CE) Ismaili doctrine had spread as far as from Yemen to Ifriqiya (modern-day Tunisia and eastern Algeria) (12), with its most prominent adherents being the Kutama Berbers of North Africa. Under the teachings of Abū ‘Abd Allāh al-Shīʿī, a pronounced Ismaili dāʿī (inviter), the Kutama had aspired to establish the dawlat al-ḥaqq (the righteous state) (16). This aspiration materialized under the allegiance of ‘Abd Allāh al-Mahdī who had been pronounced as Imam by his predecessor and later recognized as the mahdī (messianic figure) (20). This belief, nonetheless, was not accepted by all Ismailis, particularly those following Ḥamdān Qarmaṭ, who later came to be known as the Qaramiṭa (21). Sa- lamiyya (a town located in Syria), the town where ‘Abd Allāh al-Mahdī had resided, became unsafe due to Abbasid persecution, causing the Imam to migrate to various locations and eventually Sijilmasa (22). Meanwhile, the Kutama had grown to such a force that they had been able to seize control over Qayrawān of North Africa under the leadership of al-Shīʿī (22). When al-Mahdī was later arrested in Sijilmasa and the news spread to the Kuta- ma, a campaign of soldiers marched to secure his release and bring him to Qayrawān. Having accomplished this, the Fatimid State came into fruition (22). Jiwa provides sources detailing the events which led up to the Fatim- id establishment, including eyewitness accounts from Jaʿfar al-Ḥājib’s Sīrat Jaʿfar al-Ḥājib, secondary sources such as Aḥmad b. Ibrāhīm al-Naysābūrī’s Istitār al-Imām (‘The Concealment of the Imam’), and other historical works such as the influential Iftitāh al-daʿwa wa-ibtidāʿ al-dawla (‘Com- mencement of the Mission and the Beginnings of the State’) authored by Abū Ḥanīfa al-Nuʿmān (29-30). These references help readers pinpoint who was instrumental in recording Fatimid history. In chapter two, Jiwa discusses the establishment of the Fatimid state, giving details of its institutions, processes, and hallmark locations. Al-Mah- dī is seen to have incorporated officials who had previously served the Aghlabids (the previous rulers of Qayrawān). In addition, institutions such as maẓālim (oppressive acts) courts are discussed as having been estab- lished to provide redress for ordinary civilians against abuses of power (35). During this time of development, dissension amongst the Kutama is seen to have imploded on the basis of marginalized sentiments. Once having been one of the most loyal dāʿīs to al-Mahdī, al-Shīʿī had led a rebellion against his former Imam on charges of being a false mahdī. Ultimately this campaign was pacified, resulting in the execution of al Shīʿī. This chapter also reveals new characters who later became prominent figures in Fatimid history. The heir apparent or Prince Abū’l-Qāsim Muḥammad, the eldest son of al-Mahdī, already took up much of his father’s duties while his own son, Ismāʿīl or al-Manṣūr bi’llāh (‘the One Who is Victorious by God’) was entrusted by the sitting Imam, al-Mahdī (his grandfather), as his most faithful confidant (39). The port city of al-Mahdiyya which had been con- structed by the Fatimids in 916 is described as having been unique in its architectural design and strategic in its location. Al-Mahdiyya served as the new Mediterranean capital and had secured the Fatimids a booming com mercial fabric. Similarly, the city of Palermo in Sicily had been occupied by the Fatimids and had also brought a great deal of cultural exchange and goods. Jiwa brings out images of palaces and charts out maps of the port city to provide visual comprehension of the architecture. Chapter three surveys the reign of al-Manṣūr, discussing his ascension to power under fraught circumstances and his construction of a new city. This chapter focuses attention on the reconstruction of Palermo in vivid archaeological detail. Readers are informed of the Khariji rebellion from Ifrīqiya spearheaded by Abū Yazīd al-Nukkarī. The Kharijis are described to have been insurmountable by the Fatimids, pushing their Empire as far back as to the Mediterranean coast of al-Mahdiyya (60). It was not until al-Ḥasan b. ‘Alī al-Kalbī, the governor of Tunis, and his army pushed back against the Kharijis that the North African coastland would be recaptured (61). Despite this, the Kharijis were too difficult to overcome and remained at conflict with the Fatimids up until the death of Abū’l-Qāsim. Fearful that news of Abū’l-Qāsim’s death would puncture the morale of the Fatimid war effort, al-Manṣūr had managed to keep the news of his father’s passing silent. After an eventful encounter, al-Manṣūr would eventually go on to defeat Abū Yazīd’s army and restore Fatimid rule. Following this victory, al-Manṣūr began taking restorative measures to recover the now war-torn society. Socially considerate policies such as charity stipends, the appoint- ment of a Sunni-based Maliki judge, and omission of taxes were all strides in this effort. But the most significant of his developments was the con- struction of a new capital called Manṣūriyya. Much of this city’s structural inspiration came from the North African ancient ruins al-Manṣūr had been enchanted by (68). Jiwa’s training as a historian is evident in how she cites primary sources every chance she gets, from sermons to testimonies. Clos- ing this chapter, Jiwa provides an anecdote recorded by al-Nuʿmān which romantically relays the moment al-Manṣūr knew that his son, al-Muʿizz li-Dīn Allāh, was ready to ascend to power (77). Jiwa’s anecdotes connect the reader to the ethos of Fatimid personalities. Chapter four delves into the reign of al-Manṣūr’s heir, al-Muʿizz (953- 75), who came into conflict with both the Umayyads and the Byzantines during his reign and would later live out his final days in his new capital, al-Qāhira al-Muʿizziya (‘the Victorious City of al-Muʿizz’)—modern-day Cairo (78). Beyond the royal family, Jiwa presents key stalwarts that the Em- pire was indebted to. Once servant to al-Mahdī, Jawhar, who was of Slavic origin, had risen through the ranks (serving both as scribe and commander in battle), eventually being entrusted with many honorable state positions. This chapter is the longest one of the book and attempts to accomplish many things. Along with discussing the battles which ensued during this juncture, Jiwa also fleshes out the theology of Ismaili beliefs. Al-Nuʿmān is said to have written extensively on the topic—including his text written between 958 and 960, Daʿā’im al-Islām (‘Pillars of Islam’), which delineates such fundamental concepts to Ismaili theology as walāya (allegiance and obedience), īmān (faith), ẓāhir (exoteric), and bāṭin (esoteric) (88-89). The early Fatimid age is described as having been a milieu of knowledge seek- ing, with debates and lectures taking place on a frequent basis. Through the majālis (teaching sessions) program, the Ismaili doctrine would proliferate to the broader society. Jiwa’s text is filled with firsthand accounts which describe Fatimid institutions, ceremonies, and events, providing vivid pic- tures of what is being described (e.g., al-Nuʿmān’s description of the grand circumcision ceremony hosted in 962 and Ibn Haytham’s description of the diversity of attendees and tailoring of lessons in the majālis by teach- ers such as Aflaḥ b. Hārūn al-Mālūsī, 95). The tension between the Uma- yyads in Spain and the Fatimids is also presented in this chapter, depicted as stemming from their varying loyalties in the rivalry between ‘Alī b. Abī Ṭālib and Muʿāwiya. The coastal regions of the Mediterranean and North Africa would see many conflicts between the Fatimids and Umayyads; the Umayyads and the Byzantines worked together to suppress their Fatimid adversary, with the Byzantines launching campaigns on the parts of the Empire closest to Sicily while the Umayyads attacked the most western part. After briefly losing parts of their North African territories, the Fatimids eventually reasserted their control over the Maghrib, leaving the Umayyads no choice but to resort to a peace treaty (103). The Ismaili daʿwā reached far and wide, with its message gaining adherents from the Gulf of Yemen to as far as Sind. Jiwa also describes the Kalbid dynasty of Fatimid Sicily, which had come under the governorship of al-Ḥasan al-Kalbī. During this period (960-65), Sicily had been the site of intense warfare between the Fatimids and the Byzantines, with two distinct battles resulting in the most pivotal outcomes for the region, namely the Pit and the Straits (119). Like the Umayyads, the Byzantines would also later come to negotiate terms of peace with the Fatimids in 958 (116). Chapter five speaks to the venture the Fatimids made into Egypt in 966. Here, readers are presented with the terms acknowledged by local nobles such as Sharīf Abū Jaʿfar Muslim al-Ḥusaynī and the Fatimids, the founding of the new capital (al-Qāhira), and the relocation of al-Muʿizz along with a significant portion of the Manṣūriyyan population in 972. The chapter serves as both a close to the book and a cliffhanger for the second volume of the series (which turns to Fatimid rule in Egypt under the son of al-Muʿizz, Niẓār b. al-Muʿizz). Capturing the cohesive religious fabric of Fatimid rule, Jiwa notes that al-Muʿizz pledged to maintain Sunni religious life while ruling over Egypt (126); she describes pillars of Sunni Islam that can serve as points of contrast to the Ismaili tradition (127). Individuals who can justly be seen as archetypes of the Fatimid intel- ligentsia are referenced both biographically and through their works. Jiwa introduces her readers to eminent characters including missionaries like Abū Yaʿqūb al-Sijistānī of Khurāsān (d. after 971); writers and thinkers who composed the Fatimid ideology such as Qāḍī al-Nuʿmān; poets who gave inspiration such as Muḥammad b. Hānī; and generals who rendered their lives for the Fatimid Empire such as al-Ḥasan b. ‘Ali al-Kalbī. Although some readers may be frustrated by the detail of jumping back and forth across names, dates, and events, those who are able to follow the work the- matically will certainly find this work to be nothing short of informative. Jiwa impressively condenses a rich and fluid history into few pages while including the most essential elements, people, and institutions making up this period. Readers are provided with visual aids (maps, family tree charts, and city maps) to help identify and locations and structures which would otherwise come off as abstract and jargon-heavy. In addition, she includes colorful images of important monuments such as mosques, coins, and ar- tifacts. Ameen OmarMA, Islamic Studies & HistoryThe George Washington University
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/480	Duderija, Adis	The Theological Thought of Fazlur Rahman: A Modern Mutakallim: Ahad M. Ahmed Kuala Lum ur: Islamic Book Trust, 2017. 284 pages.	2018-10-29	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 35 No. 4 (2018): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 83-86	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v35i4.480	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/480/197	Reading the book under review has truly taken me down memory lane. Some 20 years ago I encountered the academic study of Islam primarily through reading the books of Professor Fazlur Rahman (including the ‘Serbo-Croatian’ translation of his book Islam) all of which left a deep and indelible impression on me both as a Muslim and as an aspiring academic. In that sense I wish I had myself authored this or a similar book. Generally speaking, Ahmed appraises and frames the theological thinking of Rahman from the perspective of considering him a significant contributor to the “Islamic theology of modernity” (jadid ‘ilm al-kalam) in the tradition of Muhammad Iqbal, the famous twentieth-century phi- losopher of the Subcontinent (xiv-xv). Rightfully so, this reviewer would add! The main aim the author sets himself in the book is to “scrutinise” Rahman’s contribution to traditional kalam, theology proper (ilāhiyāt), and prophecy (nubuwwat) but with an eye on assessing the implications Rahman’s theological thought has on “modernization and reformation of ‘ilm ul kalam” (xv). Methodologically, Ahmed considers his approach as falling in line with “the constructivist method” associated with Albert Hou- rani’s Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age (1967), “wherein the emphasis is placed on the importance of locating ideas within their unique intellectual context” and maximum attention is awarded to the influences, personality traits and circumstances that have had a bearing on the intellectual under analysis (xvi). The book under review consists of an introduction and four chapters. The first chapter is a biographical overview of Rahman’s life and his major works. It also helpfully positions Rahman’s ideas in the context of his two major interlocutory traditions, namely, what the author of the book terms (perhaps problematically) as Orientalism and Islamic orthodoxy. Finally, the chapter provides an outline of the intellectual “sources” of Rahman’s Islamic thought (Qur’an, Sunna, ijmā‘, and ijtihād) with special attention given to how his approach to these sources plays out in relation to major issues in Islamic intellectual history including the conceptual, epistemolog- ical, and hermeneutical relationship between the concepts of hadith and Sunna and his position on the issue of the closing of the gates of ijtihād. Drawing upon Rahman’s work Revival and Reform and Islam and Modernity in particular, Ahmed in the second chapter examines Rahman’s thinking on the issues pertaining to the emergence and the development of Islamic theology (kalām) and the major debates that have animated them (e.g., islām and īmān; qadar and jabr, irjā’, al-ḥusn wa-l-qubh) and the role of the major theological groups and scholars in the development of Sunni theology during the formative and post-formative stages of kalām and up to the modern period. Here Ahmed argues that Rahman’s analytical method is to seek “a synthesis between Modern Orientalist methodology and the history of kalam literature” (71), which is also evident in other aspects of Rahman’s Islamic thought—especially in his views on the nature and scope of the concept of Sunna and its relationship with the hadith literature. Chapter three, titled “Concept of God,” is dedicated to Rahman’s con- ceptualization of what constitutes an Islamic worldview and the necessary approach for arriving at it. Ahmed argues that Rahman’s thematic and con- textualist approach to the Qur’an and his dynamic concept of Sunna are the only sources he considers as normative in formulating such a worldview. In this respect Ahmed paints a picture of Rahman’s theology as having af- finities with ideas underpinning liberation theology, with its emphasis on orthopraxy, God’s concern for the poor and the marginalized, and the cre- ation of a just (socio-economic) order. As such, Rahman’s Qur’anic worl- dview, for Ahmed, points to the essentially ethical nature of the Islamic message. I fully concur with this assessment. The chapter also positions Rahman’s thought on the concept of God in relation to major ideas de- veloped by Islamic philosopher-jurists and mystics (Sufis). Ahmed, in this respect, argues that some of Rahman’s ideas were influenced by those of Ibn Sina (on whom he wrote his doctoral dissertation) but that in essence Rahman’s concept of God was different from that of both the Islamic phi- losopher-jurists and Sufis. For Rahman, in Ahmed’s view, the concept of God was that of “a God of creativity” (158). In the final chapter, Rahman’s theory of prophethood takes front stage. Ahmed argues that the roots of Rahman’s theory of prophethood are to be found in the thinking of Ibn Sina, with important modifications and addi- tions rendering theology on equal footing with philosophy (218). Ahmed also describes Rahman’s thinking on related issues such as historical de- bates on the doctrine of miracles and prophetic infallibility. The book importantly brings into discussion in one volume all of the main topics that Rahman wrote on during the course of his life, and provides an informed discussion of Rahman’s thinking as well as the major influences on his thought. Moreover, the author has also more or less successfully con- textualized Rahman’s thinking both in relation to Islamic intellectual histo- ry and the context in which Rahman himself wrote and worked (though as with all other books of this nature and scope, I am sure that specialists may take issue with how Ahmed interprets Rahman’s views). However, in this respect, the reviewer considers that no justice was done to the reception of Rahman’s ideas in the writings of Muslim and non-Muslim scholars who engaged with his ideas from the 1990s through the present. For example, one could mention the ideas of Abdullah Saeed (e.g., Reading the Qur’an in the Twenty-First Century, 2014) on contextualizing the Qur’an, inspired by Rahman’s work on the interpretation of Qur’anic ethico-legal injunctions; that of Amina Wadud (The Qur’an and Woman, 1999) and Asma Barlas (Believing Women in Islam, 2002) on producing gender-egalitarian inter- pretations that are rooted in Rahman’s double movement theory; some of my ideas on the nature and the scope of the concept of Sunna (“The Relative Status of Hadith and Sunna,” 2014) that build further on those of Rahman; and the work of other twenty-first century progressive Muslim scholars like Ebrahim Moosa and Muqtedar Khan. This of course could fill another full book but at least warranted mention here. I hope the author will consider writing a separate volume on this topic. The writing style is, at times, awkward, in part due to the book’s pri- marily descriptive orientation, for the author is often referring to the ideas of others discussed by Rahman in his own work (so that the voices of dif- ferent authors are sometimes confused). Occasional typos are present too. I would recommend this book to all those interested in Islamic intellectual history at less advanced levels and of course those who are keen to get a broad overview of the theological thinking of one of the most important Muslim academics and intellectuals of the twentieth century. However, I would still recommend a direct engagement with Rahman’s works. Adis Duderija, PhDLecturer, Study of Islam and SocietyGriffith University
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/481	Laher, Suheil	The Emergence of Early Sufi Piety and Sunni Scholasticism: ‘Abdallāh b. al-Mubārak and the Formation of Sunni Identity in the Second Islamic Century: Feryal Salem Leiden: Brill, 2016. 174 pages.	2018-07-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 35 No. 3 (2018): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 68-72	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v35i3.481	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/481/174	The book reviewed here is a welcome addition to the library of works seek- ing to construct a richer picture of the early Islamic landscape after the wane of radical revisionist theories of Islamic origins of Islam. Salem has presented a thoughtful study of the scholar-ascetic-warrior ‘Abdallāh ibn al-Mubārak (d. 181/797), and what the outlines of his life reveal about the proto-Sunnī milieu of the second Islamic century. Whereas early academic explorations of the development of Sunnī orthodoxy focused on theology and law, with Scott Lucas later highlighting the crucial role of ḥadīth, Salem has focused on the hitherto neglected dimension of ethics. The book is well laid out with an introduction, then a chapter outlining Ibn al-Mubārak’s life, followed by chapters analyzing his activities in the fields of ḥadīth, ji- hād, and zuhd respectively, wrapped up with a brief concluding chapter. Chapter 1 begins with a succinct overview of the ‘descriptive’ and ‘skeptical’ approaches among scholars of early Islamic history, followed by the relevant observation that interpretation of source material almost in- evitably reflects some of the assumptions of the scholar interpreting them. Salem makes the (unobjectionable) assertion that the contents of historical reports in early sources are indicative of attitudes and conceptions that ex- isted among Muslims at the time of authorship, regardless of whether they are historically genuine in all their details. She then presents a representa- tive selection of biographical details that paint Ibn al-Mubārak as a devout worshipper with high moral character, a scholar of ḥadīth and fiqh, yet also a wealthy and philanthropic trader and a brave man who spent much time guarding the frontiers. Nathan Hofer, in his review of the book, has cor- rectly pointed out that the historical sources Salem draws on span eight centuries, and criticizes her for failing to distinguish between material from different time periods. This criticism could have been avoided had Salem included an acknowledgment of this fact, along with a brief exposition of her assumptions about the nature of the sources and transmission into later biographies of materials not found in extant earlier chronicles. It is likely that excluding later biographical sources would not radically alter Salem’s central arguments—but the historiographically curious reader might won- der about some of the details, such as (for example) the genuineness of attribution of certain theological positions to Ibn al-Mubārak, given the highly-charged sectarian tensions that emerged in subsequent centuries, and the rather diverse early milieu that makes it difficult—as hadith master al-Dhahabī (d. 748/1348) observed—for adherents of later orthodoxy to find pure ideologues from that early period. Chapter 2 details Ibn al-Mubārak’s prowess in hadith. The sourc- es seem to be in agreement that he amassed a large number of hadiths, a feat that Salem traces to a combination of his wide travels in search of knowledge and his readiness to write down hadiths at a time when such re- cording was still controversial. (Chapter 3 brings up a third relevant factor: his interactions with other scholars while guarding the frontiers.) We are also given a useful overview of Ibn al-Mubārak’s works, both unpublished (including lost) and published. The absence of mention of one edited ver- sion of the Kitāb al-Zuhd (Sa‘īd al-Asmarī’s 824-page MA dissertation at Umm al-Qurā University from 2012) is understandable given it was not yet available at the time Salem finished her initial manuscript. This survey is followed by a sketch of Ibn al-Mubārak’s scholarly network, including both his major teachers and prominent students. Salem asserts that these net- works show the importance of both direct teacher-to-student transmission of knowledge, a mutual awareness among its members, and acknowledged (theological and ethical) criteria amongst them for legitimation of scholar- ly authority through acceptance in this network. Salem has made reference to Lucas’ important work on this, but does not reference William Graham’s essay on Traditionalism, a source that I think deserves mention regarding the continuity of the Islamic scholarly tradition. Chapter 2 also contains some important historiographical observa- tions. Salem finds that the biographical sources show an internal consis- tency and coherence that strongly suggest their overall reliability, and make it difficult to accept revisionist theories that dismiss them entirely as later inventions that were back-projected. For example, the critique of Ḥasan al-Baṣrī as a hadith narrator, in spite of the near-unanimous praise for his piety, suggests the hadith biographers were resistant to the natural tenden- cy to “aggrandize” popular persons. Salem also rightly observes that the in- formation from biographical dictionaries can undermine some of Schacht’s assumptions, but I would have liked to have seen more engagement with the academic debates (involving Schneider, Berg, Motzki and others) over whether the biographical dictionaries are actually independent sources of information. In Chapter 3, Salem argues that although the concept of martial valor as a form of piety was well known in the Late Antique Near East, it is a mistake to assume that post-expansion Muslims simply adopted it from the Christians they came in contact with. She cites Qur’ānic references to these concepts as well as numerous narrations in Ibn al-Mubārak’s Kitāb al-Jihād that chronologically mention battles in which the Prophet Muhammad was involved, as evidence that early pietist-martial men like Ibn al-Mubārak saw their activity as a continuation of indigenous Islamic teaching and practice regarding noble and ethical combat (granted of course that their understanding may have continued to evolve under other influences). For Islamic scholars to participate in guarding the frontiers, she adduces, was considered a superior form of piety than for them to live a luxurious city life. The existence of ‘religious scholars’ and ‘Qur’ānic reciters’ as a distinct class of people during this time ties in well with Salem’s assertions in the previous chapter about the transmission of religious knowledge. It might have been useful for her to cite here the work of Mustafa Shah and oth- ers who have discussed the early qurrā’ communities. A significant part of Chapter 3 discusses selected hadiths from the Kitab al-Jihād with regard to how Ibn al-Mubārak (and the community at that time) perceived jihād. In Chapter 4, Salem shows, through a comparative analysis of the early zuhd literature, that the virtuous ideal of zuhd was interpreted in diverse ways in the early community. Ibn al-Mubārak, in his own Kitāb al-Zuhd as well as in what biographical sources coherently tell us about his personal life, was a proponent of a “sober and moderate” form of zuhd as detachment of the heart from material things, along with an overarching attitude of piety, so that there is no contradiction between being wealthy and practic- ing zuhd. This stands in sharp contrast to more austere interpretations of zuhd (such as that of his contemporary, Mu‘āfā ibn Ibrāhīm) who advocat- ed a renunciation of the things of this world. While this latter group might well have been influenced by Christian ascetic practices, Salem credibly argues that a major sector of the community (typified by Ibn al-Mubārak) viewed zuhd as a broad ethical framework taken from the teachings of the Qur’ān and the Prophet Muhammad. This normative early zuhd literature, she proffers, formed the kernel of what later became Sufism, although later Sufism (and in particular the ṭarīqas) came to differ in sometimes signif- icant (and potentially problematic) ways from the earlier zuhd tradition. Hence, Salem makes a case for a “primitive” Sufism that represents a primal ethical core of Islam, in contrast to later Sufism that probably did syncreti- cally incorporate beliefs and practices from other (non-Islamic) religious traditions. Even though the book is geared towards bigger-picture arguments more than details, there could have been more precision in translation in some cases. I understand the pressures of completing a dissertation and the impossibility of perfection, and hence these critiques should not be taken to undermine the book’s worth. I found rather jarring the anachronism of translating ṣannafa/taṣnīf as “printing” (rather than the expected “author- ing” or “compilation”) when attributed to figures in the early centuries of Islam. A description of the famous Egyptian judge Ibn Lahī‘ah (d. 174/790) as muḍṭarib...yuktabu ḥadithuhū ʻalā al-iʻtibār (59), is correctly identified by Salem as a critique of his accuracy in hadith transmission, but is rather opaquely translated as “problematic....wrote hadiths for recognition.” I per- sonally would have preferred that titles like “al-Ḥāfiẓ”, “al-Imām”, and “al- ‘Alam” (at 10, for example) be translated, or at least placed before the actual name of the person in question, rather than risk non-specialists assuming these to be part of the name (though I understand that the book is directed towards specialists). Vocalizations of uncommon Arabic names are some- times inaccurate (e.g. “Sammāk” should be “Simāk”), but Salem has been exceptionally meticulous in marking in diacritics. She demonstrates a solid grasp of the overall framework of hadith-sciences and of the Arabic lan- guage, and so there are no imprecisions so egregious as to undermine her broad arguments and conclusions. Grammatical errors are extremely few. I understand that Salem’s more recent work focuses on later time pe- riods, but I would welcome further articles from her that leverage her ex- perience with the figure of Ibn al-Mubārak and her familiarity with the source materials. One possible area of further exploration for which the constraints of the dissertation did not allow but which would be useful, is some quantitative prosopographical data analysis. This could include stud- ies of the narrators of ḥadīths in Ibn al-Mubārak’s books as well as a thematic classification of all the narrations therein, which might show more clearly that the data she has cited in support of her assertions is indeed representative of the overall contents. Salem’s conclusion reads extremely well, and she has adeptly summa- rized her major findings and observations. In my estimation, the major contribution of her book has been to articulate a two-pronged centrality of ethics and morals in Sunnī orthodoxy: first, that the early zuhd genre of literature was the carrier of ethics before being subsumed later by the field of taṣawwuf; and second, that the living practice of morality and eth- ics by identified individuals in early society was central to the processes of legitimation, authority, and formation of orthodoxy (as shown by the importance of moral accreditation for being an acceptable transmitter of knowledge). Suheil LaherDean of Academics and Senior InstructorFawakih Institute for Classical Arabic
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/482	Hanaoka, Mimi	The World in a Book: Al-Nuwayri an the Islamic Encyclopedic Tradition: Elias Muhanna Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. 232 pages.	2018-07-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 35 No. 3 (2018): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 72-76	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v35i3.482	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/482/175	Elias Muhanna’s The World in a Book: Al-Nuwayri and the Islamic Ency- clopedic Tradition is an erudite, scrupulously researched, and eminently readable book that marks a significant contribution to studies in Arabic lit- erature, Mamluk history, and the production and circulation of knowledge in the medieval Islamicate world. Muhanna successfully analyzes—over the course of 232 pages with almost a dozen images and as many tables—the monumental, 31-volume encyclopedic compendium that consists of over two million words, titled Nihāyat al-arab fī funūn al-adab (The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition), composed by Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb al-Nuwayrī, an Egyptian bureaucrat and scholar, during the early fourteenth century. Muhanna’s goals are to consider why al-Nuwayrī composed his ambi- tious work; to analyze the disciplines al-Nuwayrī’s work encompassed and the models, sources, and methods that guided its composition; and to trace its reception among al-Nuwayrī’s contemporaries as well as its later recep- tion in Europe and the Islamicate world. Centering these questions on The Ultimate Ambition, Muhanna analyzes Arabic encyclopedism, a phenom- enon that reached its zenith in Egypt and Syria during the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. Muhanna challenges the argument that the rise in encyclopedism re- flected anxiety about the Mongol invasions and fears about the obliteration of civilization’s knowledge and heritage. He instead argues that encyclope- dists such as al-Nuwayrī were motivated by various factors, “chief among them the feeling of an overcrowding of authoritative knowledge in Cairo and Damascus, the great school cities of the empire” (3) which, coupled with the expansion of higher education and the migration patterns of scholars in West and Central Asia, meant that there were “new texts available for study and prompting the formation of new genres and knowledge practices” (3). The story of al-Nuwayrī is, thus, a story about the production, reception, and transmission of knowledge. Muhanna’s primary raconteurs are schol- ars of Mamluk history and historiography, Islamicate literature, and studies in the transmission of knowledge, including T. Bauer, J. Berkey, A. Blair, M. Chamberlain, L. Guo, K. Hirschler, H. Kilpatrick, D. Little, L. Northrup, C. Petry, J. Schmidt, M. van Berkel, and G. van Gelder. The World in a Book is both sweeping and specific, and it considers al-Nuwayrī’s compendium directly—not merely as a source to reconstruct Mamluk history—and assesses why encyclopedism surged during the thir- teenth through fifteenth centuries. Amongst the genres of medieval Arabic Islamicate literature to which scholars have directed their attention during the past several decades—such as adab, poetry, mirrors for princes, histo- ries, chronicles, hadith collections, and pilgrimage manuals—relatively few have studied Arabic encyclopedism. Chapter 1, “Encyclopedism in the Mamluk Empire,” explores why al-Nuwayrī compiled his work. Muhanna offers a useful distinction be- tween “encyclopedism and encyclopedia” (pp. 11-13) and grounds his ap- proach in encyclopedism, which is the idea that there is a “spectrum…upon which we might situate a variety of works belonging to different premodern genres and possessing different principles of order, structure, focus, agen- da, audience, and modes of reading” (12). The merit of this approach is that it casts a wider, less restrictive net, since “reading these texts as tokens of a similar knowledge practice rather than members of a common genre per- mits us to see the continuities between strategies of knowledge-ordering that cut across different bibliographical categories” (12). Given the fluc- tuating and complex notions of genre—the genre of medieval Arabic and Persian tārīkh, for example, encompasses a heterogeneous variety of texts, from local histories, chronicles, biographical dictionaries, and often some combination of all of the above—encyclopedism is a compelling conceptual approach to this body of literatures. Muhanna argues that while al-Nuwayrī himself situated his work within the tradition of adab, his inspirations and sources belonged to other genres, which lead to the rise of this hybrid genre of encyclopedism. Al-Nuwayrī was an esteemed copyist who directly ad- dressed the scribal arts in The Ultimate Ambition, which “both described the expectations of the scribe and provided the content of his education: it styled itself as an encyclopedic guide for an encyclopedic education” (21). Chapter 2, “Structures of Knowledge,” offers a 30,000ft view of al-Nu- wayrī’s work, including its arrangement, structure, and overall composi- tion, and compares it to other Mamluk encyclopedic texts and to earlier adab works. This chapter is particularly useful to scholars who want an introduction into The Ultimate Ambition and Arabic encyclopedism, which Muhanna argues was itself a mélange of other extant genres: the work is “not recognizably a literary anthology, a cosmographical compendium, a chronicle, a pharmacopia, or a scribal manual, but an amalgam of all of these genres” (49). Chapter 3, “Sources of Knowledge,” contextualizes al-Nuwayrī’s com- pendium by situating it within the scholarly milieu of centers of learning within the Mamluk Empire, particularly Cairo and Damascus, during the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. By situating al-Nuwayrī within the Nā- siriyya madrasa in Cairo and the intellectual, familial, and professional connections he cultivated and from which he benefitted, the author brings a granular depth to al-Nuwayrī and his work. This chapter is of particular interest to scholars of the production and circulation of knowledge. In Chapter 4, “Encyclopedism and Empire,” Muhanna turns to the im- perial and administrative scaffolding of the Mamluk Empire. The author argues that since compilers like al-Nuwayrī were part of the Mamluk bu- reaucracy, they “were particularly attuned to the processes of centralization and consolidation that transformed the politics of their time (4),” and wrote for an audience that reflected the nexus between literary encyclopedism and the imperial Mamluk state. Muhanna considers administrative knowl- edge and scholarly knowledge as separate but related spheres, arguing that “gathering vast quantities of information, collating sources, and synthe- sizing diverse types of knowledge represented the core activities of both the administrator and the large-scale compiler… a career in bureaucracy helped develop the skills of archiving and itemization that any compiler would have possessed…What set the two domains apart, however, was a difference in the types of knowledge that were valued. The world of admin- istration was one of contemporary, mutable information” (104). Muhanna’s more important argument in this chapter, however, is his claim about the unique position of Mamluk bureaucrats to be curators of knowledge and practices in the Mamluk Empire. He argues, “The common thread uniting the diverse professionals that comprised the administra- tion…was the importance attached to gathering data in the service of the state… By virtue of their access to demographic, financial, historical, and legal materials about the empire’s subjects, institutions, and communities, the bureaucratic class was in a unique position to shape the politics of their day in a manner that no other professional group could achieve” (104). As a bureaucrat-turned-scholar and an expert copyist, al-Nuwayrī embodied the related spheres of knowledge gathering, organization, and transmission in Mamluk Cairo. Chapter 5, “Working Methods,” delves into the manuscript tradition and reconstructs the composition history of al-Nuwayrī’s work. Muhanna addresses the strategies of collation, edition, and the management of sourc- es involved in the production of large compilations during the Mamluk period. The Chapter 6, “The Reception of the Ultimate Ambition,” addresses the literary afterlife of al-Nuwayrī’s work by discussing its reception in the Islamicate world and in Europe, with particular attention to the Dutch re- ception. By considering reception history of al-Nuwayrī’s work, Muhanna’s brief but engaging final chapter considers the impact of Mamluk encyclo- pedism in shaping the way Islamicate thought was perceived both within Europe and the Islamicate world. Muhanna’s appendices will prove valuable to scholars. “Appendix A: The Contents of the Ultimate Ambition” is extremely useful for those who do not share Muhanna’s patience to delve into the 31-volume work itself. In Appendix B, Muhanna compares the tables of contents of the two editions of The Ultimate Ambition: that of the standard Dar al-Kutub al-Misriyya edition, which was begun in 1923 but only completed in 1997, which is dif- ficult to access; and the more recent Dar al-Kutub al-‘Ilmiyya edition, pub- lished in Beirut in 2004, which is more widely available. The 11 figures that Muhanna intersperses throughout his book are attractive additions to his work, but it is the 13 tables that showcase Muhanna’s service to organize, divide, and categorize the sources, focusing primarily on al-Nuwayrī’s Ulti- mate Ambition itself. Some of these tables include: identifying The Ultimate Ambition’s chapter word counts for the Cairo and Beirut editions; outlining the arrangement of seven classical adab encyclopedias; and identifying and listing the sources of The Ultimate Ambition in its books 1, 3, and 4. These are valuable sources that the author has produced to help scholars and stu- dents make better sense and use of al-Nuwayrī’s massive tome. The World in a Book is a valuable contribution to studies in Arabic lit- erature, Mamluk history, and the production and circulation of knowledge in the medieval Islamicate world. Specialists will benefit most from this work, but its excellent readability makes it a valuable volume for graduate and undergraduate students as well as those interested in the production of knowledge in the Middle East more broadly. Mimi HanaokaAssociate Professor of Religious StudiesUniversity of Richmond
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/483	Semaan, Gaby	The Hunt In Arabic Poetry: From Heroic to Lyric to Metapoetic: Jaroslav Stetkevych Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2016. 356 pages.	2018-07-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 35 No. 3 (2018): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 76-79	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v35i3.483	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/483/176	In his book, The Hunt in Arabic Poetry: from Heroic to Lyric to Metapoet- ic, Jaroslav Stetkevych traces the evolution of Arabic hunt poetry from its origins as an integral part of the heroic ode (qaṣῑda) to becoming a genre by itself (ṭardiyya) during the Islamic era, and then evolving into a meta- poetic self-conscious expression of poets in our modern time. The book is a collection of a revised book chapter and a number of revised articles that Stetkevych published between 1996 and 2013 discussing Arabic hunt poet- ry at different periods spanning from the pre-Islamic age, known in Arabic as “al-‘Aṣr al-jāhiliyya” (Age of Ignorance), to the contemporary era. This does not diminish the coherence of the book nor detract from Stetkevych’s welcomed thematic approach and his contribution to literary criticism on Arabic poetry and the socio-political and linguistic factors that influenced its development and evolution. Stetkevych divides his 256-page book into three parts. The first part, entitled “The Heroic and the Anti-Heroic in the Early Arabic Ode: The Qaṣῑdah,” consists of three chapters and discusses the evolution of the qa- ṣῑda (ode) during the Age of Ignorance. Stetkevych dissects the structure of the ode and shows how hunt poetry was an integral part of it (not an independent genre). In doing so, Stetkevych draws a vivid picture of the life and geosocial terrain of the period spanning from pre-Islamic to the mid-Umayyad eras. In the first chapter, “The Hunt in the Pre-Islamic Ode”, Stetkevych uses examples mainly from the Mu‘allaqāt of Rabī‘ah ibn Maqrum, Labād Ibn Rabī‘ah, and the famous Imru’ al-Qays to illustrate the different roles hunt poetry played based on where it fell in the structure of the ode. He further establishes that the hunt section of the ode served as the origin for what later became a genre in its own right, known as ṭardiyya. In the second and third chapters, “The Hunt in the Ode at the Close of the Archaic Peri- od” and “Sacrifice and Redemption: The Transformation of Archaic Theme in al-Ḥuṭay’ah”, Stetkevych distinguishes between the different terms for “hunt” and the ṭard that would be the “chivalrous hunt” that takes place from the back of a horse. Parsing these distinctions with poems from ‘Ab- dah Ibn al-Ṭabῑb, al-Shamardal, and ‘Amr Ibn Qamῑ’ah, among others, the author sketches how hunt poetry began taking its own shape as a freestand- ing genre during the Umayyad period: when hunt poetry “is no longer ex- plicitly ‘chivalrous’… we are now in the realm of falconry” (55). The second part of the book, “The Hunt Poem as Lyric Genre in Classi- cal Arabic Poetry: The Ṭardiyyah”, is made up of four chapters that discuss the maturation of the hunt poem under ‘Abbasid rule. During that period, the cultural, economic, scientific, and social renaissance left its impact on poets and poetry. Hunt poetry became a genre of its own, taking an inde- pendent form made of hunt-specialized shorter lyrics. Stetkevych begins this section in chapter 4, “The Discreet Pleasures of the Courtly Hunt: Abū Nuwās and the ‘Abbasid Ṭardiyyah”. He shows how the move of hunt po- etry from subjective to objective description was utterly distinctive under “Abu Nuwas, the master of archaic formulas, who is capable of employing those formulas in conceits that are no longer archaic” (102). Chapter 5, “From Description to Imagism: ‘Alῑ Ibn al-Jahm’s ‘We Walked over Saffron Meadows’,” shows how Ibn al-Jahm and other Abbasid poets such as Ibn al-Mu‘tazz and Abū Firās al-Ḥamdānī “exercise considerable stylistic freedom in developing their own markedly varied but distinctive ṭardiyyah-po- ems from the broadly imagist to the highly lyrical to the fully narrative” (131). Stetkevych shows how the rhythm of hunt poetry was liberated as the Abbasid poets moved from the rajaz meter used in pre-Islamic hunt poetry to modifying and modulating “the ṭawῑl meter to create the unique rhythmic qualities” (131). In chapter 6, “Breakthrough into Lyricism: The Ṭardiyyahs of Ibn al-Mu‘tazz,” the author uses multiple examples to show how “the ṭardiyyah not only found that new lyrical voice but also allowed it … to become a closely integrated and even more broadly formative part of that poet’s multi-genre ‘project’ of a ‘new lyricism’ of Arabic poetry” (183). Chapter 7, “From Lyric to Narrative: The Ṭardiyyah of Abu Firas al-Ḥam- danῑ,” demonstrates how the prince poet “abandons the short lyric mono- rhyme for the sprawling narrative rhymed couplets (urjuzah muzdawijah)” (9). Stetkevych notes that although this “shift did not result (yet) in the achievement of a separate narrative genre, it can …be rightfully viewed as a step in the exploration of the possibility of a large narrative form” (187). The third and final section, “Modernism and Metapoesis: the Pursuit of the Poem,” discusses the revival of hunt poetry by modernist poets after being neglected for centuries. Chapter 8, “The Modernist Hunt Poem in ‘Abd al-Wahhab al Bayatῑ and Aḥmad ‘Abd al Mu‘ṭῑ Ḥijazῑ,” examines two poems of the two poets, both entitled Ṭardiyyah. Stetkevych argues that the Iraqi free-verse poet, al-Bayatῑ, transformed the “genre-and form-bound, rhymed and metered lyric… into a formally free exploration of the dra- matic and tragic image of the hunted hare as a metaphor for the political and cultural predicament of modern man” (9). Meanwhile, Hijazi’s Ṭardi- yyah transforms “the poignant lyricism of the traditional hunt poem into an expression of the poet’s personal experience of political exile and poetic restlessness and frustration” (10). The author concludes that the two poets’ explorations into ṭardiyyah “helped not only to preserve and activate the classical metaphor of hunt/ṭardiyyah into modernity, but in equal measure to validate and enrich the achievements of modern Arabic poetry” (242). In the last chapter, “The Metapoetic Hunt of Muḥammad ‘Afῑfῑ Maṭar,” Stetkevych—through interpretation, comparison, and criticism—shows how Maṭar’s modern poetry while “hermeneutically connected to the old genre… [is] very personal mythopoesis” (10). Stetkevych’s book does not discuss Andalusian hunt poetry, such as that of ‘Abbās Ibn Firnās, Ibn Hadhyal and Ibn al-Khaṭīb, nor the Ṭardiyyah of the contemporary Egyptian poet ‘Abdulraḥman Youssef, published in 2011 after the revolution in Tunisia and two days before the Egyptian revolution started. While including such examples would have further bol- stered this already strong and convincing argument and further illustrated the evolution of hunt poetry from the pre-Islamic era into modern times, their absence does not take away from the book writ large. Stetkevych’s excellent English translations of the poetry cited make his examples more accessible to readers who do not know Arabic. Overall, the book is a very valuable addition to literary criticism of Arabic poetry written in English and will surely be a great asset for scholars, students, and others interested in Arabic poetry as a reflection of a cultural and humanistic experience. Gaby SemaanAssistant Professor of ArabicUniversity of Toledo
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/484	Aljunied, Khairudin	The Koran in English: A Biography: Bruce B. Lawrence Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. 280 pages.	2018-07-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 35 No. 3 (2018): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 79-82	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v35i3.484	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/484/177	Anyone familiar with Bruce Lawrence’s oeuvre knows that the book under review is the culmination of his long and serious engagement with Islam’s foundational texts. His earlier publication, The Qur’an: A Biography (2006), traces the central place of divine revelation in Muslim life and thought for many centuries. The Qur’an inspired its most faithful believers to become predominant in much of the medieval world and, in the process, it was a book that captured the interest and imagination of non-Muslims. Law- rence’s own translation of the Qur’an into English is now in the works. Be- fore completing this admirable feat at the prime of his scholarly life, he offers us an inventory of a number of influential and no less creative—some polemical—attempts at untying the Gordian knot of rendering classical Ar- abic into lucid English. But can God’s eternal word, revealed to Prophet Muhammad in the seventh century, be translated into English at all given the deep-seated differences between the two linguistic worlds in space and time? The answer to this question is not a simple yes or no, as Lawrence explains in this slim but indispensable volume. Unlike scriptures of other world religions, the Qur’an stakes a claim on its linguistic authoritativeness from the onset. Its self-image, as specialists such as Daniel Madigan, Toshi- hiko Izutsu, and Fazlur Rahman have it, was rooted in its unique language. The Qur’anic language is thus not merely one language among others of its time (or anytime) but is the distinctive language of God to be read, stud- ied, memorized and disseminated in the original form. From this angle of vision, no translation of the Qur’an is regarded by the majority of Muslims as the Qur’an itself. Lawrence acknowledges this longstanding credo, or the dominant “filter of orthodoxy,” as he puts it (xxi). The translated Qur’an is, to him, best referred to as a “Koran”. Not that the Arabic and translated texts are radically different in terms of their central messages and moral injunctions, but that the Koran was a historical and not an eternal artefact. The Koran was a product of a human endeavor to make the language of God accessible in the world of man. The filter of orthodoxy was however confronted with an ever-growing and cosmopolitan ummah which, for the most part, consisted of non-Ar- abs who knew little but a rudimentary form of Arabic. Translations became inevitable, as Lawrence informs us. The Arabic Qur’an in its pure form gen- erated Korans in other Muslim languages (Persian, Turkish, Malay, etc.) as Islam grew to become a juggernaut after the death of Muhammad (Chapter 1). And yet, as Islam emerged triumphant as a world-conquering faith, its adversaries saw the urgent need to fully discern the scriptures that made Muslims so powerful. Translations into Latin and then English from the twelfth through the eighteenth centuries were largely born out of hate en- meshed with fear and the passionate desire among translators to convince fellow Christians of “falsehood of the Qur’an” (33). Such adverse motives however turned into an emphatic understanding of what the Qur’an actu- ally stood for, as seen in George Sale and Edward Henry Palmer’s transla- tions. The Orientalists were not all cut from the same cloth. What Lawrence does not show quite clearly was how these early English translations provided the raison d’etre for Muslims to produce their own Korans as a corrective project against the biases of Western Orientalism. In South Asian translations by Muhammad Ali, Abdul Majid Daryabadi, Mar- maduke Pickhall, and Abdullah Yusuf Ali, allusions were made, be it direct- ly or obliquely, to the problems of earlier (non-Muslim) translations, just as they sought (for example) to undo use of the terms “Mohammedan” or “Mohametan” to describe Muslims. Granted that these translators belonged to different Muslim sects, their overriding concern was that the Qur’an suf- fered from imprecise translations into English. South Asian Muslims, in my view, were not only translating the Qur’an. They were arresting the march of a prejudiced form of Orientalism by producing English Korans of their own. In hindsight, their efforts were successful, at least for a while, until the advent of the digital age. The coming of the internet and the expansion of English as a lingua franca of most of the world, as Lawrence handsomely points out, has led to the proliferation of Korans, both online and offline, by Muslims and non-Muslims, conservatives and liberals, orientalists and their detractors, Sunnis and Shi’ites, feminists and artists. To Lawrence, most translations produced in an era of abundance fail to capture the Qur’an’s rhythmic prose, with the exception of a handful. Contemporary Korans are so often contorted by the politics of ideological hegemony and nationalist parochi- alism that hinder scholarly endeavor (Chapters 4-5). Lawrence singles out Saudi translations that purvey a puritanical strand of Islam. Interestingly, there are, within Saudi Arabia itself, less literalist Korans. One wonders whether the current political transition in Saudi Arabia will give rise to newer, state-sponsored translations of the Qur’an. I certainly believe it will. For now, Lawrence shows that Salafism in Saudi Arabia (as elsewhere in the Muslim world, as many analysts have pointed out) is not by any means monochrome and homogenous. It is therefore unsurprising that different Korans have been produced in a highly controlled and conservative state. Meantime, the market is flooded with highly popular alternatives in the likes of those by Thomas Cleary, Muhammad Abdul Haleem, and Tarif Khalidi. Spoilt for choice, Muslims and non-Muslims have now the liberty to choose which translation squares with their respective lingustic tastes, spiritual quests, and worldviews. Lawrence ends the book with the latest and most innovative venture at translating the Qur’an, by artist Sandow Birk. It is a translation that comes in the form of inventive expressions, a graphic Koran, so to speak, intended for an American audience whom Birk believes can discern how the Qur’an addresses their everyday trials and tribulations. The linguistic beauty of the Qur’an, in Birk’s formulation, is best expressed in colorful images. An American himself, Lawrence is most impressed by Birk’s project, couching it as “visual and visionary, it is a hybrid genre designed to reach a new audience not previously engaged either by the Koran or by Islam” (137). Had George Sale and Henry Palmet lived to this day, they would perhaps shudder over such an Americanization of the Qur’an. In displaying art with a Qur’anic glaze, Birk does more than translating the Qur’an to English. He demonstrates how the Qur’an can be embedded and normalized into Anglo-American lives and sensibilities. Provocatively-written, deftly-researched, and a pleasure to read, The Koran in English opens up many promising pathways and novel directions for future research. The specter of the Palestinian-American scholar, Is- mail al-Faruqi, came to mind as I was reading the book. Al-Faruqi once envisioned English becoming an Islamic language, or a language that can express what Islam is more accurately. Al-Faruqi held that this could be achieved by incorporating Arabic terms into the English corpus. Reading The Koran in English tells us that Al-Faruqi’s vision is currently realized in ways he barely imagined, or perhaps, in ways that are more subtle and sublime. In translating the Koran to English—an enterprise that is now undertaken by scholars, popular writers, and artists, and that will undoubt- edly grow exponentially in the years to come—English has been (or is) Ko- ranized. Or, to borrow and inflect Lawrence’s syllogism in the opening of the book: If you don’t know Arabic, you can still understand the Qur’an. By understanding the Qur’an, you can choose to become a Muslim. And if you do not become a Muslim, you may still appreciate and derive much benefit from the Qur’an. Therefore, the Qur’an, or the Koran, is not only for Muslims but for those who care to think and reflect about life and about the divine. Indeed, “He gives wisdom to whom He wills, and whoever has been given wisdom has certainly been granted much good. And none will grasp the message except the people of intellect” (al-Baqara: 269). Khairudin AljuniedMalaysia Chair of Islam in Southeast AsiaGeorgetown University
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/485	Asmi, Rehenuma	Everyday Conversions: Islam, Domestic Work, and South Asian Migrant Women in Kuwait: Attiya Ahmad Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. 288 pages.	2018-07-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 35 No. 3 (2018): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 83-86	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v35i3.485	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/485/178	There is a tendency in academic literature to compare and contrast reli- gions to try to understand the motivations of the convert. What are the costs and benefits of conversion? What is gained and what is lost? Thinking in these utilitarian terms can lead to a focus on causality and materiality, rather than the metaphysical and ephemeral aspects of religious thought and practice. Furthermore, religious conversion to Islam is often mired in the same prejudices and stereotypes of the orient found in western and predominantly Judeo-Christian depictions of the Middle East, the region that Islam is most often associated with. In Everyday Conversions: Islam, Domestic Work, and South Asian Migrant Women in Kuwait, Attiya Ahmad moves away from the emphasis on what distinguishes religious traditions and discursive communities to focus on what religious conversion means to the individual convert. Ahmad seeks to counter the notion that conver- sion must have some material benefit to the convert and instead looks at the quotidian character of religious transformation. Ahmad argues in her eth- nographic work that conversion can be understood through the minutiae of daily interactions, conversations, and affections that develop over time. She follows the lives of migrant domestic workers in the Gulf and their relationships with their employers as well as their own families over the course of their conversions and argues that it is neither the strength of the da'wa movement in Kuwait, nor the benefits gained by conversion to the employee/employer relationship that effectively describes the reason the women convert (although Ahmad is admittedly not looking for causality). Instead, Ahmad writes: “I have sought to tell a more modest and mundane set of stories that convey moments of slippage, tension and traces of feel- ings, thoughts and impressions of everyday conversion” (194). The strengths of Ahmad’s ethnography lie in its attention to detail and equanimity in representing the challenges of migration and domestic labor. Ahmad is careful not to create victims, nor inflate the value of the women’s migration and conversion to their economic or personal well-being. In this approach, there are hints of Lila Abu-Lughod’s and Saba Mahmood’s work with women who appear to be in marginal or precarious positions. Like these feminist ethnographers, Ahmad is attuned to the ethics and politics of representation, but with an eye towards transnational and cultural stud- ies. In its theoretical framing, the ethnography calls to mind the work of Michel DeCerteau in The Practice of Everyday Life, which rejects theories of production to focus on the consumer. Furthermore, by placing conversion in light of transnational migration, Ahmad also shows how the individu- al convert navigates her conversion through the complex nexus of Kuwait City as well as her own home town. Thus, the individual convert as artist of her own conversion is the primary subject of Ahmad’s book. My one cri- tique of the book would be in the area of theory, where Ahmad is hesitant to challenge others who have written on the subject of Islamic religious faith and practice, despite the theoretical weight evident in her ethnography. In the introduction, Ahmad begins with Talal Asad and Saba Mah- mood’s seminal arguments in the field of anthropology of Islam, which she argues “relativize and provincialize secular modern understandings of sub- jectivity, agency and embodied practice” (9). She distinguishes her work from Asad and Mahmood’s by utilizing a transnational feminist framework that highlights the process of “mutual constitution and self-constituting othering, as well as sociohistorical circumstances” (10). Ahmad wants to go beyond discursive narratives of secular liberalism and the Islamic piety movement. Specifically, Ahmad follows the approach of Eve Sedgewick, who eschews Judith Butler’s “strong theory” in exchange for an approach that looks at factors that “lie alongside” gender performativity (23). Ahmad does this by showing “how religious conversion also constitutes a complex site of interrelation through which religious traditions are configured and reconfigured together” (24). Instead of showing conflict or contrasting discursive traditions, Ahmad contends that the best way to understand the lives and stories of her interlocutors are in the quotidian affairs of the households they work and live in. She divides the chapters into the affec- tive experiences the women have as a result of their migration experiences, which in turn spur their conversions. Chapters one and two cover the political and geographic terrain that the women must cut across, which produces an overwhelming feeling of being neither here nor there, but temporarily suspended between states, households, and religions. Chapter one paints a somewhat grim picture of the politically precarious position of migrant women within the kefala sys- tem, labor laws, and bans on migrations often creating impossible condi- tions for migrant woman. Chapter two sets out to “discern, document and describe” (66) the migratory experience and why it produces uncertainty about one’s place in the world. It follows the women back and forth between Kuwait and their home countries, emphasizing the socio-historical context that requires a transnational feminist framework. The four women that Ah- mad follows throughout the book share their migratory journeys and their sense of “suspension” between two households. This chapter segues neatly into chapter three, where the women share how being a female migrant and domestic laborer requires knowledge of cross-cultural norms regarding gender, all of which require the women to be naram, “a gendered, learned capability of being malleable that indexes proper womanhood” (122). In their own eyes, a successful domestic worker from South Asia bends to the norms of the society they are in, and they attribute male and female migrant failure to being too sakht, or hard and unyielding. Here, I would have liked a stronger connection between how she describes naram and how Mahmood describes malaka. Does being naram lay the groundwork for women’s conversion to Islam, a religion which requires the ability to engage in rituals entailing patience, modesty, and steadfastness? Ahmed hints at this connection in the conclusion to the chapter—“Being naram resonates with the fluid, flexible student-centered pedagogies of Kuwait’s Islamic dawa movement, thus facilitating domestic worker’s deepening learning of Islamic precepts and practices” (123)—but she could have spent more time discussing the overlap in the concepts in either chapter three or five, where she discusses the da'wah movement. Chapters four and five deal directly with questions of religious thought and practice and illustrate how the women grapple with Islamic practices in the household as their relationships with their employers deepen. Chapter five is about the household and the everyday conversations or “house talk” that Ahmad argues are the touchstones for the women’s conversion. The daily relations in the household make blending and layering practices of Is- lam onto older traditions and rituals seem easy and natural. Ahmad argues that “the work undertaken by domestic workers—such as tending to family members during trips and caring for the elderly or the infirm—necessari- ly involves the disciplining and training of their comportment, affect and sense of self ” (129) and makes Islamic practices easier to absorb as well. Chapter 6 is a foray into the da'wah movement classroom. Like Mahmood’s Politics of Piety, Ahmad shows how the teachers and students use the space to create “intertwining stories” of patience in the face of hardship and the eventual rewards that come from this ethical re-fashioning, which mirror their own hardships as converts and help them deal with the dilemmas of being female migrant and domestic workers. The chapter ends with a sense of uncertainty, returning to the themes of temporality and suspension that began the book. Ahmad can’t say whether the conversions will remain fixed pieces or will bend and move with the women as their circumstances change. In the epilogue, Ahmad follows the “ongoing conversions” of her inter- locutors as some of them return home as Muslims and encounter new chal- lenges. As a book that focuses on the everyday, it is fitting to end on a new day and possibly, a new conversion. The strength of Ahmad’s ethnography is in giving center-stage to the considerable creativity and diligence mi- grant women show in piecing together their own conversions. This piecing together is perfectly captured by the book’s cover, which features Azra Ak- samija’s “Flocking Mosque”. The structure of a flower illustrates how believ- ers form a circular and geometric shape when gathered in devotion to God. Like Aksamija’s patterns, which build into a circular design, Ahmad’s chap- ters each represent a key piece of the story of migrant domestic workers’ conversion to Islam as a gradual process that blends nations, households, and individuals together to create a narrative about the women’s newfound faith. Scholars should read this book for its textured and detailed observa- tions about migrant women’s daily lives and for its treatment of religious conversion as a gradual process that unfolds in the everyday experiences of individuals. It would also be a great book for students as theory takes a back seat to the ethnography. The book is a refreshing, graceful approach to the subject of religious conversion and Islamic faith. Ahmad stays focused on telling her interlocutors’ stories while navigating often conflicting posi- tions. Rehenuma AsmiAssistant Professor of Education and International StudiesAllegheny College
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/486	Bullock, Katherine	Pious Fashion: How Muslim Women Dress: Elizabeth Bucar Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017. 248 pages.	2018-07-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 35 No. 3 (2018): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 87-90	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v35i3.486	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/486/179	This book is a very welcome addition to the literature on Muslim women’s dress. It is part of a growing trend to treat Muslim women and their sarto- rial choices through sophisticated theories that recognise the agency, even humanity, of Muslim women. We are far from the days when an Ameri- can author would simply read a headscarf as a symbol of oppression, and Muslim women in need of rescue—at least in the academic realm, though certainly not in the political and journalistic realms. Easy to read and en- gaging (but not simplistic) studies like Bucar’s will, hopefully, eventually trickle out of academia and lead to a sea-change in political and popular discourses as well. Bucar, a professor of philosophy and religion, has turned to ethnog- raphy to complement her philosophical explorations of the relationship between dress, aesthetics, and morality. One of the special features of this book, and what I believe distinguishes it and makes its insights possible, is Bucar’s self-reflective nature, and willingness to share that as she writes. The book begins with a preface, which explains how Bucar came to study this topic while in Tehran to study Persian and Islamic women’s groups in 2004. It opens with her very honest discussion of how she was sitting nervously in the airplane, wondering whether or not she would be able to follow the conditions of her visa to observe local laws and wear “proper hi- jab” (vii). A woman sitting in the aisle across from her winks and pulls out her own scarf and overcoat, setting Bucar at ease, who then follows suit. She describes how she spent a few months adjusting to wearing hijab and figur- ing out the various ways women in Tehran adhere to the hijab laws. Flying next to Turkey, and experiencing some unexpected internal reactions to going bareheaded, made her see that “modest dress had a moral effect on me” (ix), altering her sense of public space and the aesthetics of women’s clothing. “I found surprise, pleasure, and delight in pious fashion, as well as an intellectual challenge to the neat boxes I had once put things in: modest dress as imposed on women, fashion as a symptom of patriarchy, and aes- thetics as separate from ethics. This book is an exploration of this delight and challenge” (ix). Following is the introduction, where she lays out her key terms, meth- odology, and research questions. Bucar explains that she prefers the term “pious fashion” to “modest clothing” or “fashion veiling.” This is so because clothing is a cultural practice that is “governed by social forces as well as daily individual choices” (2). “Fashion” allows people to “construct iden- tities, communicate status, and challenge aesthetic preferences.” “Modest” is generally meant to describe clothing that is “decent and demure,” that discourages sexual attention, but she learned that Muslim women’s dress is more than this, as it is connected to “ethical and religious dimensions… such as character formation through bodily action, regulating sexual de- sires between men and women, and creating public space organized around Islamic moral principles” (3). Hence her preference for the phrase “pious fashion.”Next appear country case studies of how Muslim women in different locales take up “pious fashion”. She did fieldwork in three cities—Tehran, Iran (2004 and remotely 2011); Istanbul, Turkey (2004, 2012, 2013); and Yogyakarta, Indonesia (2011)—observing women in a variety of locations, going shopping, and participating in activities related to pious fashion (in- cluding wearing it herself sometimes). She conducted focus groups and interviews with women between ages eighteen and thirty wearing pious fashion. After opening with a brief introduction to the country-specific poli- tics of modest dress, each chapter is divided into two main sections: “style snapshots” and “aesthetic authorities.” The style snapshots are often very detailed descriptions (half a page for a single outfit) of different kinds of dress, including material, stitching, colour, patterns, style cuts, and accesso- ries. These sections can be a challenge for those not that interested in such details of fashion. The book contains twenty color photographs to illus- trate the styles of dress she discusses, but I still found a laptop an essential component to look up images of the stylists she was referring to, or more basic visual aids to know the difference between “chiffon” and “crepe,” or a “manteau” and a “tunic.” Yet it is such intimate details that give life to her book. These details of fashion are not the object of the book, though, for she embeds these discussions in deeper conversations about aesthetics, moral- ity, piety, beauty, and cultural and political aspects of clothing and fashion. The sections on “aesthetic authorities” cover religious authorities, governments, visual images, educators, fashion designers, magazines, and bloggers’ pious fashion discourses in each country. She is able to highlight differences and similarities across countries, as well as the prevalence of different interpretations and debates amongst all these different voices on what does and does not count as “pious fashion.” She includes discussions about what are counted as “bad hijab” or fashion failures, as an important way to understand the delimitations of pious fashion in each country. Chapter Four presents summarizing conclusions. Here she argues that unlike the normal western approach which considers hijab as a “problem” to be solved, it is rather a woman’s decision about what to wear which should be analytically considered: “the duty to dress modestly does not resolve this question: even if certain institutional structures and public norms related to taste, virtue, and femininity set limits and provide guidance, Muslim wom- en have a great deal of choice when they get dressed every day” (171). She explores the intersections between national identity, modernity, femininity, modesty, aesthetic rebellion, women’s agency, materialism, the consumer lifestyle, aesthetic concepts of beauty and its relationship to morality and fashion, and tradition and change. She concludes that the study of pious fashion teaches us that piety…[is] not just about obedience to orthodox interpretations of sacred texts: it also incorporates good taste, personal style, and physical attrac- tiveness. And fashion becomes a key location through which piety can be realized and contested. Piety is not only about being good – it is about appearing to be good as well…[Women who wear pious fashion] are pi- ous because they are using clothing and adornment to cultivate their own characters, to build community, and to make social critiques. (190) The book ends with an epilogue pointing to a sudden interest, since 2016, in “pious fashion” from the mainstream Western ‘secular’ fashion industry. She notes the two different directions this goes politically—ei- ther to celebrate Muslim women’s inclusion in wider society (CoverGirl’s use of first hijabi spokesperson, Nura Afia, 2016, 195) or to criticise Islam’s pollution of secular fashion (designers are encouraging the enslavement of women) (196). One of the main reasons this book works so well is Bucar’s wonderful ability to be empathetic without being an apologist. She does not wear hijab in her life in the United States; the book is not advocating hijab. She does not gloss feminist concerns over patriarchy and pressures to wear hijab, nor the impact of hijab laws that frustrate many women in Tehran. She recognises the complex nature between dress, identity, fashion, and philo- sophical questions like ethics and the nature of being. She normalizes hijiab so that it can be studied, not as some kind of weird, exotic, oppressive, sui generis piece of cloth, but like any other piece of women’s clothing, like mini-skirts, jeans, high heels, or the bra: While modest clothing can indeed be used as a form of social control or as a display of religious orthodoxy, in practice, it is both much less and much more. Much less, because for many Muslim women, it is simply what they wear. Much more, because like all clothing, Muslim women’s clothing is diverse, both historically and geographically, and is connected with much broader cultural systems. (1) Katherine BullockLecturer, Department of Political ScienceUniversity of Toronto at Mississauga
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/487	Parray, Tauseef Ahmad	Islam, State and Modernity: Mohammed Abed al-Jabri and the Future of the Arab World: Ziad E adat, Francesca M. Corrao, & Mohammed Hashas, eds. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2018. 320 pages.	2018-07-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 35 No. 3 (2018): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 90-92	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v35i3.487	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/487/180	Mohammed Abed al-Jabri (1935-2010) is one of the most original Arab philosophers, thinkers, and social theorist of recent times. Al-Jabri, who held the post of Professor of Philosophy at University of Rabat (Moroc- co), is the author of over 30 books—mostly on Arab Islamic thought—of which the best-known are works like Critique of Arab Reason (1984-2001, 4 vols.), Arab Political Reason (1990), An Introduction to the Noble Qur’an (2006), and Democracy, Human Rights and Law in Islamic Thought (2009). Though al-Jabri is “one of the most original and multifaceted philosophers and intellectuals of our time” (p. xii), commands considerable influence on the Arab world, and is regarded as significant and influential as the Irani- an Abdolkarim Soroush, the Egyptian Hasan Hanafi, and the French Mo- hammed Arkoun, he has remained insufficiently recognized in the West or Euro-American scholarship. The volume under review, first of its kind in English, is thus dedicated to exploring and highlighting varied aspects of al-Jabri’s thought, philosophy, and impact. Edited by Zaid Eyadat (University of Jordan), Francesca M. Corrao, and Mohammed Hashas (both from LUISS, University of Rome), this work analyzes and highlights “how al-Jabri has been a fertile intellectual force in the contemporary Arab world” (15). The volume consists of fourteen chapters divided into two parts: Part I is titled ‘Al-Jabri’s Reconstruction of Arab-Islamic Thought’ (Chapters 2-8), and Part II is titled ‘Politics, Ethics, and the Future of the State in the Arab World’ (Chapters 9-14). These are bookended by a foreword (ix-xiii) by Abdou-Filali Ansary and a biograph- ical appendix. The work acts as an “introductory volume for more future work” to be done in the English language “on this far-sighted Arab-Muslim philosopher” (15). What follows below is a survey of some selected chapters from each part of the book, so as to get an impression of what is contained, discussed, and explored in this volume. In the introduction (Chapter 1), the editors situate and contextual- ize the philosophy and legacy of al-Jabri within the broader perspective of contemporary Arab thought. They argue that the volume is focused on an aspect of Arab philosophy, dealing “with a philosophical project that classifies Arab intellectual history and contributes to contemporary Arab political philosophy” (8). Massimo Companini (Chapter 2) explores the work of al-Jabri and Hasan Hanafi vis-à-vis Ibn Khaldun and Ibn Rushd, and tries to find a “Path to Modernity” (41). His main argument is that al-Jabri contends for the “Averroistic” interpretation of the “future of Arab-Islamic culture”, which is both “rationalistic and democratic” (25) and thus fits aptly within the present political trend. Abdul Karim Barghout et al. (Chapter 3) focus on the Syrian thinker George Tarabishi’s (d. 2016) Critique of the Critique of Arab Reason (1996), by expounding their disagreements on Arab history. The differences between al-Jabri and Tabarishi remain over the theoretical frameworks or methodological grounds, not on historical substance. These and other chapters of this part revolve mostly around al-Jabri’s Critique. However, Mariangela Laviano (Chapter 6) provides a “preliminary overview of al-Jabri’s introductory work on the Qur’an” (2006), in which al- Jabri “gives a systematic rereading of the Qur’an and its phenomenon” and provides a “chronological order of decent of revelation (tartīb al-nuzūl), and not the common order/ sequence, i.e., tartīb al-tilāwa/ tartīb al-muṣḥaf” (114). For Laviano, al-Jabri considers the Qur’an a Text which needs to be “studied in its context, but at the same time taking into consideration its sa- credness” (114-115); such a “rational approach helps the reader to look at some Qura’nic verses,…, in the light of historical context” and thus gives “more attention to human rights and rebuilding the Arab world” (120). Part II of this volume is concentrated on exploring “the question of politics and ethics in a-Jabri’s examination of the history of ideas of the Arab-Islamic world.” It highlights his significance and relevance in the pre and post-Arab Spring eras in MENA as well as considers his thought’s pos- sible influence on the “future of the Arab state” (17). Mohsine El Ahmadi (Chapter 9) reflects on the aspects of al-Jabri’s political thought by focusing on the question of state and religion through an exposition of his Critique of Arab Political Reason (1984) and Religion, State, and Implementation of Shari‘a (1996). It clearly reveals al-Jabri’s “intellectual position on Islam and political power” (173), which is mainly “decisive in the reconstruction of modern thought based on the reason and democracy” (172). Ahmadi also focuses on “specific critique of Islamic historicity” (176), and concludes that “Historicity, epistemology, and secularism are dialectical foundations of al-Jabri’s views on Arab-Islamic reform” and thus represent a “major de- velopment in the transformation of Arab-Islamic political thought” (180). Zaid Eyadat and Hanadi Riyad (Chapter 12) focus on al-Jabri’s “effort and his contribution to Arab intellectual thought” by analyzing, critically, his Arab Ethical Reason (2006)—a work yet-untranslated and so unavail- able to an English audience. This chapter aims to introduce it to the West- ern reader while suggesting a “way forward from al-Jabri’s work towards a more creative and peaceful Arab Reason”. The last chapter, “The Arab Possible State: From al-Tahtawi to al- Jabri,” by Mohammed Hashas (Chapter 14), reinvigorates the possibility of a “modern Arab state” based on “Arab-Islamic tradition”, despite various “obstacles encountering its realization”, as manifested, most recently, in the Arab Spring (272). Hashas deliberates on “three Arab political discourse levels”, viz. ‘Arab Renaissance avant-gardists’, ‘Arab Nationhood Discourse’, and ‘State Discourse Around Arab Spring’. Later, he elaborates the state concept in al-Jabri’s thought, concluding that al-Jabri calls for a “democrat- ic modern state”, neither secular nor liberal, which will be based on the three principles of “human rights, the rule of law and rationality” (290). Written by specialists at various stages of their careers, and keeping in view the richness and diversity of topics, Islam, State and Modernity is a significant contribution to exploring the various aspects of al-Jabri’s thought, philosophy, and legacy for a wider readership, on topics ranging from Arab–Islamic thought to the state, politics, ethics, education, and the Qur’an phenomenon. It will prove helpful to students and scholars in a wide range of disciplines, ranging from Middle East Studies to Philosophy. Tauseef Ahmad ParrayAssistant Professor, Islamic Studies, Higher Education DepartmentJammu & Kashmir, India
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/488	Iqbal, Basit Kareem	Religion as Critique: Islamic Critical Thinking from Mecca to the Marketplace: Irfan Ahmad Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017. 300 pages.	2018-07-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 35 No. 3 (2018): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 93-98	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v35i3.488	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/488/181	Christianity was the religion of spirit (and freedom), and critiqued Islam as a religion of flesh (and slavery); later, Christianity was the religion of reason, and critiqued Islam as the religion of fideism; later still, Christianity was the religion of the critique of religion, and critiqued Islam as the most atavistic of religions. Even now, when the West has critiqued its own Chris- tianity enough to be properly secular (because free, rational, and critical), it continues to critique Islam for being not secular enough. In contrast to Christianity or post-Christian secularism, then, and despite their best ef- forts, Islam does not know (has not learned from) critique. This sentiment is articulated at multiple registers, academic and popular and governmen- tal: Muslims are fanatical about their repressive law; they interpret things too literally; Muslims do not read their own revelation critically, let alone literature or cartoons; their sartorial practices are unreasonable; the gates of ijtihād closed in 900CE; Ghazali killed free inquiry in Islam… Such claims are ubiquitous enough to be unremarkable, and have political traction among liberals and conservatives alike. “The equation of Islam with the ab- sence of critique has a longer genealogy in Western thought,” Irfan Ahmad writes in this book, “which runs almost concurrently with Europe’s colonial expansion” (8). Luther and Renan figure in that history, as more recently do Huntington and Gellner and Rushdie and Manji.Meanwhile in the last decade an interdisciplinary conversation about the stakes, limits, complicities, and possibilities of critique has developed in the anglophone academy, a conversation of which touchstones include the polemical exchange between Saba Mahmood and Stathis Gourgouris (2008); the co-authored volume Is Critique Secular? (2009), by Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Mahmood; journal special issues dedi- cated to the question (e.g. boundary 2 40, no. 1 [2013]); and Gourgouris’s Lessons in Secular Criticism (2013), among others. At the same time, the discipline of religious studies remains trapped in an argument over the lim- its of normative analysis and the possibility of critical knowledge.Religion as Critique: Islamic Critical Thinking from Mecca to the Mar- ketplace seeks to turn these debates on their head. Is critique secular? Decidedly not—but understanding why that is, for Ahmad, requires revising our understanding of critique itself. Instead of the object of critique, reli- gion here emerges as an agent of critique. By this account, God himself is the source of critique, and the prophets and their heirs are “critics par ex- cellence” (xiv). The book is divided into two parts bookended by a prologue and epilogue. “Formulation” comprises three chapters levying the shape of the argument. “Illustration” comprises three chapters taking up the case study of the South Asian reformer Abul-A‘la Maududi and his critics (es- pecially regarding his views on the state and on women) as well as a fourth chapter that seeks to locate critique in the space of the everyday. There are four theses to Ahmad’s argument, none of them radically original on their own but newly assembled. As spelled out in the first chap- ter (“Introduction”), the first thesis holds that the Enlightenment reconfig- uration of Christianity was in fact an ethnic project by which “Europe/the West constituted its identity in the name of reason and universalism against a series of others,” among them Islam (14). The second thesis is that no crit- ic judges by reason alone. Rather, critique is always situated, directed, and formed: it requires presuppositions and a given mode to be effective (17). The third thesis is that the Islamic tradition of critique stipulates the com- plementarity of intellect (‘aql, dimāgh) and heart (qalb, dil); this is a holistic anthropology, not a dualistic one. The fourth thesis is that critique should not be understood as the exclusive purview of intellectuals (especially when arguing about literature) or as simply a theoretical exercise. Instead, cri- tique should be approached as part of life, practiced by the literate and the illiterate alike (18).The second chapter, “Critique: Western and/or Islamic,” focuses on the first of these theses. The Enlightenment immunized the West from critique while subjecting the Rest to critique. An “anthropology of philosophy” approach can treat Kant’s transcendental idealism as a social practice and in doing so discover that philosophy is “not entirely independent” from ethnicity (37). The certainty offered by the Enlightenment project can thus be read as “a project of security with boundaries.” Ahmad briefly consid- ers the place of Islam across certain of Kant’s writings and the work of the French philosophes; he reads their efforts to “secure knowledge of humani- ty” to foreclose the possibility of “knowledge from humanity” (42), namely Europe’s others. Meanwhile, ethnographic approaches to Muslim debates shy away from according them the status of critique, but in so doing they only maintain the opposition between Western reason and Islamic unrea- son. In contrast to this view (from Kant through Foucault), Ahmad would rather locate the point of critical rupture with the past in the axial age (800-200BCE), which would include the line of prophets who reformed (critiqued) their societies for having fallen into corruption and paganism. This alternative account demonstrates that “critical inquiry presupposes a tradition,” that is, that effective critique is always immanent (58). The third chapter, “The Modes: Another Genealogy of Critique,” con- tests the reigning historiography of “critique” (tanqīd/naqd) in South Asia that restricts it to secular literary criticism. Critique (like philosophy and democracy) was not simply founded in Grecian antiquity and inherited by Europe: Ahmad “liberates” critique from its Western pedigree and so allows for his alternative genealogy, as constructed for instance through readings of Ghalib. The remainder of the chapter draws on the work of Maududi and his critics to present the mission of the prophets as critiquing to reform (iṣlāḥ) their societies. This mandate remains effective today, and Maududi and his critics articulate a typology of acceptable (tanqīd) and unacceptable (ta‘īb, tanqīṣ, tazhīk, takfīr, etc.) critiques in which the style of critique must be considered alongside its object and telos. Religion as Critique oscillates between sweeping literature reviews and close readings. Readers may find the former dizzying, especially when they lose in depth what they gain in breadth (for example, ten pages at hand from chapter 2 cite 44 different authors, some of whom are summarizing or contesting the work of a dozen other figures named but not cited di- rectly). Likewise there are moments when Ahmad’s own dogged critiques may read as tendentious. The political purchase of this book should not be understated, though the fact that Muslims criticize themselves and others should come as no surprise. Yet it is chapters 4–6 (on Maududi and his critics) which substantiate the analytic ambition of the book. They are the most developed chapters of the book and detail a set of emerging debates with a fine-grained approach sometimes found wanting elsewhere (espe- cially in the final chapter). They show how Islam as a discursive tradition is constituted through critique, and perhaps always has been: for against the disciplinary proclivities of anthropologists (who tend to emphasize discon- tinuity and rupture, allowing them to discover the modern invention of traditions), Ahmad insists on an epistemic connection among precolonial and postcolonial Islam. This connection is evident in how the theme of rupture/continuity is itself a historical topos of “Islamic critical thinking.” Chapter 4 (“The Message: A Critical Enterprise”) approaches Maududi (d. 1979) as a substantial political thinker, not simply the fundamentalist ideologue he is often considered to be. Reading across Maududi’s oeuvre, Ahmad gleans a political-economic critique of colonial-capitalist exploita- tion (95), a keen awareness of the limits of majoritarian democracy, and a warning about the dispossessive effects of minoritization. Maududi’s Isla- mism (“theodemocracy”), then, has to be understood within his broader project of the revival of religion to which tanqīd (“critique”), tajdīd (“re- newal”), and ijtihād (“understanding Islam’s universal principles to de- termine change”) were central (103). He found partial historical models for such renewal in ‘Umar b. ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, Ghazali, Ibn Taymiyya, Ahmad Sirhindi, and Shah Wali Ullah. A key element of this critique is that it does not aim to usher in a different future. Instead it inhabits a more complicated temporality: it clarifies what is already the case, as rooted in the primordial nature of humans (fiṭra), and in so doing aligns the human with the order of creation. This project entails the critique and rejection of false gods, in- cluding communism, fascism, national socialism, and capitalism (117). Chapter 5 (“The State: (In)dispensible, Desirable, Revisable?”) weaves together ethnographic and textual accounts of Maududi’s critics and de- fenders on the question of the state (the famous argument for “divine sov- ereignty”). In doing so the chapter demonstrates how the work of critique is undertaken in this Islamic tradition, where, Ahmad writes, “critique is connected to a form of life the full meaning of which is inseparable from death” (122). (This also means that at stake in critique is also the style and principles of critique.) The critics surveyed in this chapter include Manzur Nomani, Vahiduddin Khan, Abul Hasan Ali Nadvi, Amir Usmani, Sadrud- din Islahi, Akram Zurti, Rahmat Bedar, Naqi Rahman, Ijaz Akbar, and others, figures of varying renown but all of whom closely engaged, defend- ed, and contested Maududi’s work and legacy in the state politics of his Jamaat-e Islami. Chapter 6 (“The Difference: Women and In/equality”) shows how Maududi’s followers critique the “neopatriarchate” he proposes. Through such critique, Ahmad also seeks to affirm the legitimacy of a “nonpatri- archal reading of Islam” (156). If Maududi himself regarded the ḥarem as “the mightiest fortress of Islamic culture” (159)—a position which Ahmad notes is “enmeshed in the logic of colonial hegemony”—he also desired that women “form their own associations and unbiasedly critique the govern- ment” (163). Maududi’s work and legacy is thus both “disabling” and “en- abling” for women at the same time, as is borne out by tracing the critiques it subsequently faced (including by those sympathetic to his broader proj- ect). The (male) critics surveyed here include Akram Zurti, Sultan Ahmad Islahi, Abdurrahman Alkaf, and Mohammad Akram Nadwi, who seriously engaged the Quran and hadith to question Maududi’s “neopatriarchate.” They critiqued his views (e.g. that women were naturally inferior to men, or that they were unfit for political office) through alternative readings of Islamic history and theology. Chapter 7 (“The Mundane: Critique as Social-Cultural Practice”) seeks to locate critique at “the center of life for everyone, including ordinary sub- jects with no educational degrees” (179). Ahmad writes at length about Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan (d. 1988), the anticolonial activist who led a massive movement against colonial domination, and whose following faced British brutality with nonviolence. The Khudai Khidmatgār movement he built was “a movement of critique” (195), Ahmad writes, composed of or- dinary men and women, peasants and the unlettered. The brief remainder of the chapter suggests that the proverbs which punctuate everyday life (for example, in the trope of the greedy mullah) also act as critiques. By the end of Religion as Critique it is difficult not to see critique na- scent in every declaration or action. This deflates the analytic power of the term—but perhaps that is one unstated aim of the project, to reveal critique as simply a part of life. Certainly the book displaces the exceptional West- ern claim to critique. Yet this trope of exposure—anthropology as cultural critique, the ethnographer’s gaze turned inward—also raises questions of its own. In this case, the paradigmatic account of critique (Western, sec- ular) has been exposed as actually being provincial. But the means of this exposure have not come from the alternative tradition of critique Ahmad elaborates. That is, Ahmad is not himself articulating an Islamic critique of Western critique. (Maududi serves as an “illustration” of Ahmad’s ar- gument; Maududi does not provide the argument itself.) In the first chap- ters (“Formulation”) he cites a wide literature that practices historicism, genealogy, archeology, and deconstruction in order to temper the universal claims of Western supremacists. The status of these latter critical practices however is not explored, as to whether they are in themselves sufficient to provincialize or at least de-weaponize Western critique. Put more directly: is there is a third language (of political anthropology, for example) by which Ahmad analytically mediates the encounter between rival traditions of cri- tique? And if there is such a language, and if it is historically, structurally, and institutionally related to one of the critical traditions it is mediating, then what is the status of the non-Western “illustration”? The aim of this revision of critique, Ahmad writes, is “genuinely dem- ocratic dialogue with different traditions” (xii). As much is signalled in its citational practices, which (for example) reference Talal Asad and Viveiros de Castro together in calling for “robust comparison” (14) between West- ern and Islamic notions of critique, and reference Maududi and Koselleck together in interpreting critique to be about judgment (203). No matter that Asad and de Castro or Maududi and Koselleck mean different things when using the same words; these citations express Ahmad’s commitment to a dialogic (rather than dialectical) mode in engaging differences. Yet because Ahmad does not himself explore what is variously entailed by “comparison” or “judgment” in these moments, such citations remain as- sertions gesturing to a dialogue to come. In this sense Religion as Critique is a thoroughly optimistic book. Whether such optimism is warranted might call for a third part to follow “Formulation” and “Illustration”: “Reckoning.” Basit Kareem IqbalPhD candidate, Department of Anthropologyand Program in Critical TheoryUniversity of California, Berkeley
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/489	Anzalone, Christopher	Salafism in Nigeria: Islam, Preaching, and Politics: Alexander Thurston New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. 300 pages.	2018-07-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 35 No. 3 (2018): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 98-103	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v35i3.489	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/489/182	The global spread of Salafism, though it began in the 1960s and 1970s, only started to attract significant attention from scholars and analysts outside of Islamic studies as well as journalists, politicians, and the general public following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks perpetrated by Al-Qaeda Central. After the attacks, Salafism—or, as it was pejoratively labeled by its critics inside and outside of the Islamic tradition, “Wahhabism”—was accused of being the ideological basis of all expressions of Sunni militancy from North America and Europe to West and East Africa, the Arab world, and into Asia. According to this narrative, Usama bin Laden, Ayman al-Za- wahiri, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and other Sunni jihadis were merely putting into action the commands of medieval ‘ulama such as Ibn Taymiyya, the eighteenth century Najdi Hanbali Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab, and modern revolutionary ideologues like Sayyid Qutb and ‘Abdullah ‘Azzam. To eradicate terrorism, you must eliminate or neuter Salafism, say its critics. The reality, of course, is far more complex than this simplistic nar- rative purports. Salafism, though its adherents share the same core set of creedal beliefs and methodological approaches toward the interpretation of the Qur’an and hadith and Sunni legal canon, comes in many forms, from the scholastic and hierarchical Salafism of the ‘ulama in Saudi Arabia and other Muslim majority countries to the decentralized, self-described Salafi groups in Europe and North America who cluster around a single char- ismatic preacher who often has limited formal religious education. What unifies these different expressions of Salafism is a core canon of religious and legal texts and set of scholars who are widely respected and referenced in Salafi circles. Thurston grounds his fieldwork and text-based analysis of Salafism in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country and home to one of the world’s largest single Muslim national populations, through the lens of this canon, which he defines as a “communally negotiated set of texts that is governed by rules of interpretation and appropriation” (1). He argues fur- ther that in the history of Nigerian Salafism, one can trace the major stages that the global Salafi movement has navigated as it spread from the Arab Middle East to what are erroneously often seen as “peripheral” areas of the Islamic world, Africa and parts of Asia. The book is based on extensive fieldwork in Nigeria including interviews with key Nigerian Salafi scholars and other leading figures as well as a wide range of textual primary sourc- es including British and Nigerian archival documents, international and national news media reports, leaked US embassy cables, and a significant number of religious lectures and sermons and writings by Nigerian Salafis in Arabic and Hausa. In Chapter One, Thurston argues that the Salafi canon gives individ- ual and groups of Salafis a sense of identity and membership in a unique and, to them, superior religious community that is linked closely to their understanding and reading of sacred history and the revered figures of the Prophet Muhammad and the Ṣaḥāba. Salafism as an intellectual current, theology, and methodological approach is transmitted through this can- on which serves not only as a vehicle for proselytization but also a rule- book through which the boundaries of what is and is not “Salafism” are determined by its adherents and leading authorities. The book’s analytical framework and approach toward understanding Salafism, which rests on seeing it as a textual tradition, runs counter to the popular but problematic tendency in much of the existing discussion and even scholarly literature on Salafism that defines it as a literalist, one-dimensional, and puritani- cal creed with a singular focus on the Qur’an and hadith canon. Salafis, Thurston argues, do not simply derive religious and legal rulings in linear fashion from the Qur’an and Prophetic Sunna but rather engage in a co- herent and uniform process of aligning today’s Salafi community with a set of normative practices and beliefs laid out by key Salafi scholars from the recent past. Thurston divides the emergence of a distinct “Salafi” current within Sunnis into two phases. The first stretches from 1880 to 1950, as Sun- ni scholars from around the Muslim-majority world whose approaches shared a common hadith-centered methodology came into closer contact. The second is from the 1960s through the present, as key Salafi institutions (such as the Islamic University of Medina and other Saudi Salafi bodies) were founded and began attracting and (perhaps most importantly) fund- ing and sponsoring Sunni students from countries such as Nigeria to come study in Saudi Arabia, where they were deeply embedded in the Salafi tra- dition before returning to their home countries where, in turn, they spread Salafism among local Muslims. Nigeria’s Muslim-majority north, as with other regions such as Yemen’s northern Sa‘ada governorate, proved to be a fertile ground for Salafism in large part because it enabled local Muslims from more humble social backgrounds to challenge the longtime domi- nance of hereditary ruling families and the established religious class. In northern Nigeria the latter was and continues to be dominated by Sufi or- ders and their shaykhs whose long-running claim to communal leadership faced new and substantive theological and resource challenges following the return of Nigerian seminary students from Saudi Arabia’s Salafi scho- lastic institutions in the 1990s and early 2000s. In Chapters Two and Three, Thurston traces the history of Nigerian and other African students in Saudi Arabia, which significantly expanded following the 1961 founding of the Islamic University of Medina (which remains the preeminent Salafi seminary and university in the world) and after active outreach across the Sunni Muslim world by the Saudi govern- ment and Salafi religious elite to attract students through lucrative funding and scholarship packages. The process of developing an African Salafism was not one-dimensional or imposed from the top-down by Saudi Salafi elites, but instead saw Nigerian and other African Salafi students partici- pate actively in shaping and theorizing Salafi da‘wa that took into account the specifics of each African country and Islamic religious and social envi- ronment. In Nigeria and other parts of West and East Africa, this included considering the historically dominant position of Sufi orders and popular practices such as devotion to saints and grave and shrine visitation. African and Saudi Salafis also forged relationships with local African partners, in- cluding powerful political figures such as Ahmadu Bello and his religious adviser Abubakar Gumi, by attracting them with the benefits of establishing ties with wealthy international Islamic organizations founded and backed by the Saudi state, including the Muslim World League. Nigerian Salafis returning from their studies in Saudi Arabia actively promoted their Salafi canon among local Muslims, waging an aggressive proselytization campaign that sought to chip away at the dominance of traditional political and religious elites, the Sufi shaykhs. This process is covered in Chapter Four. Drawing on key sets of legal and exegetical writ- ings by Ibn Taymiyya, Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab, and other Salafi scholars, Nigerian Salafis sought to introduce a framework—represented by the canon—through which their students and adherents approach re- ligious interpretation and practice. By mastering one’s understanding and ability to correctly interpret scripture and the hadith, Salafis believe, one will also live a more ethical life based on a core set of “Salafi” principles that govern not only religious but also political, social, and economic life. Salaf- ism, Thurston argues, drawing on the work of Terje Østebø on Ethiopian Salafism, becomes localized within a specific environment.As part of their da‘wa campaigns, Nigerian Salafis have utilized media and new technology to debate their rivals and critics as well as to broad- en their own influence over Nigerian Muslims and national society more broadly, actions analyzed in Chapter Five. Using the Internet, video and audio recorded sermons and religious lectures, books and pamphlets, and oral proselytization and preaching, Nigerian Salafis, like other Muslim ac- tivists and groups, see in media and technology an extension of the phys- ical infrastructure provided by institutions such as mosques and religious schools. This media/cyber infrastructure is as, if not increasingly more, valuable as the control of physical space because it allows for the rapid spread of ideas beyond what would have historically been possible for local religious preachers and missionaries. Instead of preaching political revo- lution, Nigerian Salafi activists sought to win greater access to the media including radio airtime because they believed this would ultimately lead to the triumph of their religious message despite the power of skeptical to downright hostile local audiences among the Sufi orders and non-Salafis dedicated to the Maliki juridical canon.In the realm of politics, the subject of Chapter Six, Nigeria’s Salafis base their political ideology on the core tenets of the Salafi creed and canon, tenets which cast Salafism as being not only the purest but the only true version of Islam, and require of Salafis to establish moral reform of a way- ward Muslim society. Salafi scholars seek to bring about social, political, and religious reform, which collectively represent a “return” to the Prophet Muhammad’s Islam, by speaking truth to power and advising and repri- manding, as necessary, Muslim political rulers. In navigating the multi-po- lar and complex realm of national and regional politics, Thurston argues, Nigerian Salafi scholars educated in Saudi Arabia unwittingly opened the door to cruder and more extreme, militant voices of figures lacking the same level of study of the Salafi canon or Sunni Islam generally. The most infamous of the latter is “Boko Haram,” the jihadi-insurgent group today based around Lake Chad in Nigeria, Chad, and Niger, which calls itself Jama‘at Ahl al-Sunna li-l-Da‘wa wa-l-Jihad and is led by the bombastic Abubakar Shekau. Boko Haram, under the leadership first of the revivalist preacher Mu- hammad Yusuf and then Shekau, is covered at length in the book’s third and final part, which is composed of two chapters. Yusuf, unlike mainstream Nigerian Salafis, sought to weaponize the Salafi canon against the state in- stead of using it as a tool to bring about desired reforms. Drawing on the writings of influential Arab jihadi ideologues including Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi and the apocalyptic revolutionary Juhayman al-‘Utaybi, the lat- ter of whom participated in the 1979 seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Yusuf cited key Salafi concepts such as al-walā’ min al-mu’minīn wa-l-bara’ ‘an al-kāfirīn (loyalty to the Believers and disavowal of the Disbelievers) and beliefs about absolute monotheism (tawḥīd) as the basis of his revival- ist preaching. Based on these principle, he claimed, Muslims must not only fulfill their ritual duties such as prayer and fasting during Ramadan but also actively fight “unbelief” (kufr) and “apostasy” (ridda) and bring about God’s rule on earth, following the correct path of the community of the Prophet Abraham (Millat Ibrāhīm) referenced in multiple Qur’anic verses and outlined as a theological project for action by al-Maqdisi in a lengthy book of that name that has had a profound influence on the formation of modern Sunni jihadism. Instead of seeing Boko Haram, particularly under Shekau’s leadership, as a “Salafi” or “jihadi-Salafi” group, Thurston argues it is a case study of how a group that at one point in its history adhered to Salafism can move away from and beyond it. In the case of Shekau and his “post-Salafism,” he writes, the group, like Islamic State, has shifted away from the Salafi canon and toward a jihadism that uses only stripped-down elements from the canon and does so solely to propagate a militaristic form of jihad. Even when referencing historical religious authorities such as Ibn Taymiyya, Thurston points out, Boko Haram and Islamic State leaders and members often do so through the lens of modern Sunni jihadi ideologues like Juhay- man al-‘Utaybi, al-Maqdisi, and Abu Mus‘ab al-Zarqawi, figures who have come to form a Sunni jihadi canon of texts, intellectuals, and ideologues. Shekau, in short, has given up canonical Salafism and moved toward a more bombastic and scholastically more heterodox and less-Salafi-than- jihadi creed of political violence. Thurston also pushes back against the often crude stereotyping of Af- rican Islamic traditions and movements that sees African Muslims as being defined by their “syncretic” mix of traditional African religious traditions and “orthodox” Islam, the latter usually a stand-in for “Arab” and “Middle Eastern” Islam. Islam and Islamic movements in Africa have developed in social and political environments that are not mirrors to the dominant models of the Arab world (in particular, Egypt). He convincingly points out that analysis of all forms of African Islamic social and political mobi- lization through a Middle East and Egypt-heavy lens obscures much more than it elucidates. The book includes useful glossaries of key individuals and Arabic terms referenced in the text as well as a translation of a sermon by the late, revered Salafi scholar Muhammad Nasir al-Din al-Albani that is part of the mainstream Salafi canon. Extensive in its coverage of the his- tory, evolution, and sociopolitical and religious development of Salafism in Nigeria as well as the key role played by Saudi Salafi universities and religious institutions and quasi-state NGOs, the book expands the schol- arly literature on Salafism, Islam in Africa, and political Islam and Islamic social movements. It also contributing to ongoing debates and discussions on approaches to the study of the role of texts and textual traditions in the formation of individual and communal religious identity. Christopher AnzaloneResearch Fellow, International Security ProgramBelfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University& PhD candidate, Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/490	Zaman, Maheen	Jihad & Co.: Black Markets and Islamist Power: Aisha Ahmad New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. 303 pages.	2018-07-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 35 No. 3 (2018): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 104-107	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v35i3.490	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/490/183	In this critically insightful and highly readable book of political ethnogra- phy, Aisha Ahmad, a political scientist at University of Toronto, seeks to explain how and why Islamist movements continue to militarily prevail and politically succeed in forming proto-states, over clan, ethnic, and/or tribal based competitions, amidst the chaos and disorder of civil wars across the contemporary Muslim world, from Mali to Mindanao. To this end, Ahmad seeks to go beyond the usual expositions that center the explanatory power of Islamist ideologies and identities, which dominate the scholarly fields of political science, international relations, security studies as well as the global public discourse shaped by journalists, politicians, and the punditry of shouting heads everywhere. Through a deep, immersive study of power in Afghanistan and Soma- lia, Ahmad demonstrates the profoundly symbiotic relationship between Islamists and the local business class. While recognizing the interconnec- tions between violent conflict and illicit trade is nothing new, Ahmad’s explication of the economic logics of Islamist proto-states furnishes a nov- el two-stage dynamic to explain the indispensability and ubiquity of this Islamist-business alliance in conflict zones. The first is the gradual social process of conversion of the business class’ worldview and practice to align them with Islamist identity formations, which is “aimed at mitigating un- certainty and improving access to markets” (xvii). Alongside this long-term socialization is a second, short-term political-economic dynamic of rapid shift in the business class’s collective patronage of a new Islamist faction, based on the assumption that it will lower the cost of business. The for- midable alliance between business class interests and Islamist institutions brings forth the new Islamist proto-state. Chapter one of the book adum- brates this two-stage argument and offers justifications for the two case studies, namely the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Islamic Courts Union in Somalia. The second chapter unpacks the two-stage dynamic in detail. We learn that in modern civil wars across the Muslim world, business communi- ties intentionally adopt ardent Islamist identities as a practical means to- ward building trust and lowering cost. Islamist factions, aspiring toward hegemony, offer the possibility of economic relationships that transcend the ethnic boundaries which limit rival factions rooted in clan, tribal, or ethno-linguistic social formations. This leads to the second, faster conver- gence of business-Islamist interests, wherein the Islamist groups leverage their broader social identity and economic market to offer stronger secu- rity at a lower cost. This development of an economy of scale leads the local business elites to throw their financial support behind the Islamists at a critical juncture of militant competition. Once this threshold is met, Islamist factions rapidly conquer and consolidate territories from their rel- atively socially constrained rivals to form a new proto-state, like the Taliban regime and the Islamic Courts Union (ICU). When we look at the timeline of their development (the Taliban in 1994 and the ICU in 2006), we notice a similar length of gestation, about 15 years of war. This similarity may be coincidental, but the political-military threshold is the same. Both societ- ies, ravaged by civil war, reached a stalemate. At this critical juncture the positional properties of Islamist formations in the field of civil war factions gives the Islamists a decided economic (cost analysis) and social (trust building across clan/tribal identities) advantage. Chapters three to six examine each of the two processes for the se- lected sites of inquiry. Thus chapters three and five, respectively, explore the long-term Islamist identity construction within the smuggling industry in the Afghanistan-Pakistan borderland, and the Somali business elites’ gradual convergence with Islamists. In chapter four, Ahmad explores the second dynamic in the context of rising security costs during the Afghan civil war. Mullah Omar’s Taliban provided the order and security across the borderland that had previously eluded the variety of industries. This allowed the Taliban to expand on the backs of voluntary donations, rather than extortions like their rival tribal warlords, which in turn allowed them to recruit and retain more disciplined fighters (81). The source of these donations was the business class, especially those involved in the highly lucrative transit trade, which, before the rise of Taliban, paid immense op- portunity cost at the hands of rapacious local and tribal warlord fiefdoms and bandits. Instead of the multitude of checkpoints crisscrossing south- ern Afghanistan and the borderlands, the Taliban presented a simplified administration. While the rest of the world took notice of their repressive measures against women’s mobility, education, and cultural expression, the men of the bazaar appreciated the newly acquired public safety to ply their trade and the lowered cost of doing business. Chapter six, “The Price of Protection: The Rise of the Islamic Courts Union,” demonstrates a similar mutually beneficial Islamist-business relationship emerging out of the incessant clan-based militia conflicts that had especially plagued southern Somalia since the fall of the last national government in 1991. Businesspeople, whether they were tycoons or small business owners, had to pay two types of tax. First was what was owed to the local racket or warlord, and the second was to the ever-fragmenting sub-clan militias and their checkpoints on the intercity highways. Unlike their rival, the Transitional Federal Government (TGF), ICU forged their supra-clan institutional identity through a universalist legal discourse and practice rooted in Islamic law and ethics. They united the courts and their associated clan-based militias, including al-Shabaab. Ahmad demonstrates, through a synthesis of secondary literature and original political ethnogra- phy, the economic logics of ICU’s ability to overcome the threshold of ma- terial and social support needed to establish the rule of law and a far-reach- ing functioning government. If the Taliban and the ICU had solved the riddle of creating order and security to create hegemonic proto-states, then what was their downfall? Chapter seven gives us an account of the international interventions that caused the collapse of the two proto-states. In the aftermath of their de- struction, the internationally supported regimes that replaced them, de- spite immense monetary and military aid, have failed to gain the same level of legitimacy across Afghanistan and Somalia. In chapter eight, Ahmad expands the scope of analysis to North/Western Africa (Al-Qaeda in the Is- lamic Maghrib: AQIM), Middle East (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria: ISIS), and South Asia (Tahrik-i Taliban-i Pakistan: TTP). At the time of this book’s publication, these movements were not yet, as Ahmad posits, closed cases like the Taliban and the ICU. Thus, the data from this chapter’s comparative survey furnishes suggestive arguments for Ahmad’s larger thesis, namely that Islamist proto-states emerge out of a confluence of economic and security interests rather than mere ideological and identity politics. The epistemic humility of this chapter signals to this reader two lines of constructive criticism of some aspects of Ahmad’s sub- stantiation of this thesis. First, the juxtaposing of Islamist success against their clan-/tribal iden- tity-based rivals may be underestimating the element of ethnic solidarity in those very Islamists’ political success. The most glaring case is the Taliban, which in its original formation and in its post-American invasion frag- mentations, across the Durand Line, was more or less founded on a pan- or-tribal Pashtun social identity and economic compulsions relative to the other Afghan ethno-linguistic communities. How does one disaggregate the force of ethnic solidarity (even if it is only a necessary condition, rather than a cause) from economic calculus in explaining the rise of the Taliban proto-state? The second issue in this juxtaposition is that when we compare a suc- cessful Islamist movement against socially limited ethnocentric rivals, we discount the other Islamist movements that failed. Explanations for those Islamists that failed to create a proto-state along the lines of the ICU or the Taliban, such as al-Ittihad al-Islamiyya (Somalia) or Gulbuddin Hekmat- yar’s Hezb-e Islami (Afghanistan), needed to be more robustly taken into account and integrated into the substantiation of Ahmad’s thesis. Even in the section on ISIS, it would have been helpful to integrate the case of Jabhat al-Nusra’s (an al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria) inability to create a proto-state to rival ISIS. We must ask, why do some Jihadi Islamist movements prevail against each other and why do others fail? Perhaps some of these Islamist movements appear too early to scale up their operation (i.e., they precede Ahmad’s ‘critical juncture’), or they were too embroiled and too partisan in the illicit trade network to fully leverage their Islamist universalism to create the trust and bonds that are the first part of Ahmad’s two-stage dy- namic. Possible answers would need to complement Ahmad’s excellent po- litical ethnography with deeper quantitative dives to identify the statistical variations of these critical junctures: when does the cost of warlords and mafias’ domination outweigh the cost of Islamist-Jihadi movements’ social- ly repressive but economically liberating regimes? At which point in the social evolution of society during an unending civil war do identities forged by the bonds of blood give way to those imagined through bonds of faith? These two critical suggestions do not diminish Ahmad’s highly teach- able work. This book should be read by all concerned policy makers, schol- ars in the social sciences and humanities, and anyone who wants to go be- yond ‘culture talk’ historical causation by ideas and identity and uncover structuralist explanations for the rise of Jihadi Islamist success in civil wars across the Muslim world. It is especially recommended for adoption in cog- nate courses at the undergraduate level, for its combination of erudition and readability. Maheen ZamanAssistant ProfessorDepartment of HistoryAugsburg University
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/491	Tekelioglu, Ahmet Selim	The Practice of Islam in America: An Introduction: Edward Curtis IV, ed. New York: New ork University Press, 2017. 296 pages.	2018-07-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 35 No. 3 (2018): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 108-111	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v35i3.491	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/491/184	Since September 11, American Muslim identities, political views, sensi- bilities, and even private lives have been studied by academics, pollsters, government agencies, and think tank researchers. This renewed interest on the nexus of religious and national identity has produced a vast volume of publications, cross-cutting each social science discipline and thematic re- search area. Some are even available online, such as #islamophobiaisracism syllabus, #BlackIslamSyllabus and ISPU’s Muslim American Experience Bibliography page. What is often lost in this conversation, however, are the nuances that influence everyday lives of American Muslims and their practice of Islam. Situated within religious studies and Islamic studies scholarship and speak- ing to a broad disciplinary array, the edited volume The Practice of Islam in America: An Introduction is a much-needed contribution to the scholarship on Islam and American Muslims. The book’s editor, prolific and prominent scholar and historian of Is- lam in America, Edward Curtis IV, explains the goals of the book in this sentence: “This book is driven by the desire to provide clear answers to es- sential, and basic, questions about how observant Muslim Americans prac- tice Islam…” (2). Importantly, the book delivers on its promise to provide a lived religion perspective (3). While the twelve chapters in The Practice of Islam in America examine distinct practices and themes, the chapters synergize in giving voice to a lived religion perspective on American Muslims’ practices. This approach helps the reader to achieve a healthy distance from the significant but often overly dominant political context that influences discourse on American Muslim life. The book opens with an introductory chapter by Curtis, explaining the rationale and background to the project. The chapter is a good prelude to this rich volume, reflecting Curtis’ years of experience working on Muslim American history and experience. For the non-specialist audience, the in- troductory chapter also provides a broad historical overview of American Muslim history, starting from the slave trade and stretching into contem- porary Islamophobia while covering debates within the diverse American Muslim community. The volume is organized across four thematic parts. Each part includes three chapters, producing a rich, twelve-chapter account. Part I examines prayer and pilgrimage and includes chapters on ṣalāt, dhikr, and ḥajj. Part II explores holidays; individual chapters cover Ramadan and Eid celebra- tions, Ashura, and Milad/Mawlid celebrations. Part III takes the reader into the realm of life cycle rituals with chapters on birth, wedding, and funeral/ death rituals. The concluding Part IV touches on Islamic ethics and reli- gious culture. It examines philanthropy, food practices and engagements with the Qur’an with reference to everyday practices of American Muslims. Curtis explains in his introduction that the volume is intentional in de- veloping a lived religion focus. Moreover, almost all authors give examples for how these practices vary in different branches of Islam (Sunni, Twelver and Isma‘ili/Bohra Shi‘i communities) as well as for multiple ethno-racial demographic groups that make up the deeply pluralistic Muslim American fabric. Contributors should be applauded for producing chapters that are ethnographically rich, thematically diverse, and attentive to multiple sites and dynamics. Chapter 1 moves through multiple vignettes that involve ṣalāt, the Muslim ritual prayer. Rose Aslan’s vivid descriptions of the lives of Ameri- can Muslims and her ability to walk the reader along not only the basics of the prayer but also the nuances among individuals with diverse ethno-racial and socioeconomic backgrounds and the post-September 11 securitization of ṣalāt is refreshing. Rosemary R. Corbett’s chapter on dhikr—“medita- tive and sometimes joyous religious litanies,” to use the definition offered by Curtis in the introductory chapter (6)—is a comparative study of three related groups, each springing from the Turkish Halveti Cerrahi order. The historical account around the creation of these groups is helpful especially because one of these figures, Tosun Bayrak of the Spring Valley Halveti Cerrahi order, recently passed away. In the next chapter, Hussein Rashid skillfully walks the reader through the meaning, rites, and politico-eco- nomic realities surrounding ḥajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudia Arabia. His chapter helps to familiarize the readers with complexities of ḥajj. Part II of the book begins with Jackleen Salem’s nuanced and vivid account of Ramadan, Eid al-Fitr, and Eid al-Adha. In testament to the volume’s attention to inclusivity, Michael Muhammad Knight’s chapter on Ashura is a vivid and informative account of this most popular Shi‘i commemoration. This chapter is less ethnographically driven than other chapters preceding it, perhaps to the advantage of the common reader who learns a great deal about early Muslim history and the background to the Sunni-Shi‘i split. The same is true also for Marcia Hermansen’s chapter on Milad/Mawlid celebrations recognizing Prophet Muhammad’s birth. The chapter strikes a balance between academic information on the subject and a thick description of these ceremonies. She provides a superb account of major debates and disagreements within the Muslim community sur- rounding these celebrations for the benefit of the uninitiated reader. In the first chapter of Part III, Maria Curtis explores birth rituals ranging from baby-showers to naming a child to postpartum complexities faced by moms within the American Muslim community. Her chapter is noteworthy in producing a much-needed addition to these underexplored topics. Juliane Hammer’s chapter on weddings is an exploration of not only ceremonial aspects of marriage but also legal approaches to marriage in America through a rich ethnographic account of three distinct weddings. She gives due attention to textual and Qur’anic interpretations on love and mercy by American Muslims. Her chapter is among those that provide the common reader with a nuanced view of the scholarship on the theme that is under exploration. The same is true for Amir Hussain’s chapter on Muslim funerals. Speaking from within a few funeral processions in southern Cali- fornia, as well as a brief description of the funeral ceremony of Muhammad Ali, Hussain explores the rites of death and burial in the American Muslim landscape.The first chapter of Part IV, by Danielle Witman Abraham, examines philanthropy and social giving in the American Muslim community. The chapter explains the norms in Sunii and Shi‘i communities, including concerns about domestic vs. international giving. Chapter 11, by Magfirat Dahlan, delves into American Muslims’ food consumption choices. She explores the fluid categories of permissible and impermissible food as well as ethical vs. non-ethical food as perceived by her respondents. The final chapter of the book is by Mona Ali and focuses on the Qur’an and how American Muslims engage with Islam’s holy book. Her approach provides a concise and effective summary of the Qur’an’s role in life cycles, identity formation and internal conversations among American Muslims. While the individual chapters’ focus on specific contexts and ethno- graphic accounts is very helpful, some chapters leave the reader with a sense of incompleteness due to the brief attempt to cram information on the broader context in the last two pages of each chapter. For example, in Chapter 1, Rose Aslan invokes the American Muslim debate around cre- ating gender equity in mosques and the third space wave but cannot do justice to the multifaceted conversations and developments around this issue. Chapter 4 by Jackleen Salem also suffers from trying to deliver too much. Salem’s concluding section, “Eid as an American Holiday,” fails to mention the heated debates that defined the “White House Iftar” dinners during President Obama’s presidency. These kinds of omissions create a kind of wedge between the complexities that arise in the everyday practice of Islam and the volume’s broader reflections. Chapter 9, by Amir Hussain, details Muhammad Ali’s funeral but does not fully engage with the debates and choices that marked the funeral. One wonders too if inclusion of other dhikr practices adapted by American Muslim followers of the Tijaniyya or the Ba‘Alawi sufi networks could have been helpful to give voice to dhikr practice in Chapter 2, out- side the Halveti Jerrahi context. Another theme that is neglected lies in the chapter on philanthropy, which does not mention what are often heated debates within American Muslim communities on the jurisprudence (fiqh) of giving to non-Muslims as well as whether certain service organizations (such as those serving students or social justice needs) are zakāt-eligible.There are practices that are left out as well. Du‘a Kumayl, practiced by Shi‘i Muslims on Thursday evenings similar to mawlid ceremonies, is not mentioned in the text. It would have been enriching to include this practice of reading a prayer that is traced to Prophet Muhammad’s cousin and one of the four great caliphs, Imam Ali. Finally, the choice to not cite online resources with their full web ad- dresses seems like an odd choice for a volume this rich in content. The lack of a full pathway in many instances makes it difficult for researchers to access information. These slight omissions notwithstanding, The Practice of Islam in Amer- ica: An Introduction is a great resource for instructors to use in introducto- ry courses in religious studies and American Muslim studies programs, as well as a good supplementary text for anyone teaching Islam in interfaith contexts. It delivers on its promise to provide rich narratives on what Is- lam looks like as a lived religion in America. It is highly relevant for those teaching not only on Islam but also on religion generally. The editor as well as the authors deserve recognition for producing a nuanced and insightful volume. Ahmet Selim TekeliogluAli Vural Ak Center for Global Islamic StudiesGeorge Mason University
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/492	Sabet, Amr G.E.	Middle East Studies for the New Millennium: Infrastructures for Knowledge: Seteney Shami & Cynthia Miller-Idriss, eds. New York: New York University Press, 2016. 487 pages.	2018-07-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 35 No. 3 (2018): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 112-115	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v35i3.492	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/492/185	Middle East Studies for the New Millennium sheds light on the trials and tribulations of Middle East area studies in the highly charged and politi- cized context of American academia and broader US policy. In this respect, it is an important exposition of how American universities produce knowl- edge about different world regions (ix). The study is the outcome of a research project that spanned a period of nearly fifteen years since 2000. The introductory chapter, by book editors Shami and Miller-Idriss and titled “The Many Crises of Middle East Stud- ies” (MES), refers to the contextual status of the field and relates its ‘crises’ to an American setting in which knowledge and power are intrinsically, even if not always clearly, juxtaposed. Shami and Miller-Idriss point out that three main institutional actors define the politics of the field: univer- sities, federal government, and private philanthropic foundations (8). The role of the US federal government in producing knowledge, the relation- ship between knowledge and power, and ways of knowing about ‘other’ cultures and places has long been a source and subject of numerous debates and controversies (1), but the authors problematize it in terms of the “se- curitization of academic knowledge in the name of ‘national interest,’ the challenges arising out of the possibilities of unbounded, transnational fields of scholarship and the future of the university as an institution” (2). The MES also faced an additional crisis as a growing number of social scientists came to perceive it as too focused on in-depth studying of areas instead of seeking to produce knowledge based on universal theories or explanations. MES, thus, increasingly occupied a diminishing space in social sciences in favor of a humanistic turn toward cultural and linguistic approaches (9). This, according to Shami and Miller-Idriss was not simply a matter of intel- lectual skepticism, but rather a reflection of deliberate attempts at siphon- ing social scientists from universities, narrowing knowledge to specific agenda-settings, and limiting space for alternative perspectives. Due to the perceived ‘anti-Americanism’ of MES, in good measure emanating from claims about Edward Said’s “pernicious influence,” the field has increasingly come under siege through federal monitoring, campus watch, scrutiny of scholars exchanges, and funding restrictions (10). Problematizing the context of MES in such terms helps frame the ap- proach of this study around three main themes that comprise the three parts of the book and its eleven chapters. These include the relationship be- tween MES and other social science disciplines, reconfigurations, and new emphases in MES focusing on university restructuring, language training and scholarly trends, and the politics of knowledge as they relate specifical- ly to the many crises in the Middle East (11). Part I, titled “Disciplines and its Boundaries,” comprises four chap- ters, which highlight the interdisciplinary nature of area studies as a sub- field within the entire “problem-solving” structure of social sciences. This tendency distinguished area studies from earlier Orientalist/civilizational scholarly traditions. The four chapters in Part I cover the relationship be- tween area studies and political science (Lisa Wedeen), sociology (Reshat Kasaba), economics (Karen Pfeifer), and geography (Amy Mills and Timur Hammond). Together, they demonstrate how the privileged discipline or “prestige area” for theorizing reflects a different relationship with area studies depending on the discipline’s definition of the “universal” (11). Wedeen challenges positivist/methodological claims about the separation of fact and value, and the unification of liberalism and science in such a fashion as to render the subfield of American studies a standard universal “nonarea”, reflecting American exceptionalism (12). Kasaba examines the historically cyclical relationship between sociology and area studies “as a push-and-pull reaction to particular political imperatives,” related to how social sciences and American foreign policy have been intertwined since WWII (12). Pfeifer focuses on how international financial institutions have shaped much of western economists’ approaches to the Middle East region, entrenching neoclassical economic ideas associated with stabilization, lib- eralization, and privatization (13). Mills and Hammond examine the “spa- tial turn” in area studies, and how spatial methodologies have provided for a means to understand the broad socio-economic and political dynamics that have served to shape the Middle East. They point also to the interdisci- plinary nature of spatial studies that could very well transform area studies by linking the region to its global context (14-15). Part II, titled “Middle East Studies and the University,” comprises four chapters by Jonathan Z. Friedman and Cynthia Miller-Idriss, Elizabeth An- derson Worden and Jeremy M. Browne, Laura Bier, and Charles Kurzman and Carl W. Ernst. These chapters highlight how knowledge about the Middle East are produced through changing institutional structures and architectures, particularly in relation to the rise of “the global” as a major organizational form within American universities. They also focus on the “capacities” needed to produce a new generation of qualified specialists ca- pable of dealing with profound regional changes that would also require dif- ferent policy and educational approaches (15). Friedman and Miller-Idriss look at the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies at New York University (NYU) in order to investigate how area studies centers as well as universities are to transform themselves into global institutions. They point to two separate but coexisting logics of internationalization: that of the specialist with deeper knowledge of the area, and the cosmopolitan who emphasizes breadth in global experience in order to produce the ‘global citizen’ (15-16). Worden and Browne focus on reasons why it was difficult for American institutions to produce proficient Arabic language speakers in significant numbers. They offer an explanation in terms of structural and cultural factors related to time constraints that graduate students face in or- der to learn the language, the relative lower status of language instructors, the devaluation of language learning by some social sciences disciplines, and, for all practical purposes, the difficulty of learning Arabic. Bier ana- lyzes PhD dissertations concerned with the Middle East across six social sciences disciplines (political science, sociology, anthropology, economics, history and MES) during the period 2000-2010, focusing on their themes, topics and methods (253). She points out that neoliberalism and what is termed the ‘Washington Consensus’ have come to dominate political sci- ence, sociology and economics, while issues of identity, gender, colonial- ism, the nation, and Islam dominate in anthropology, history, and MES. Kurzman and Ernst go beyond Bier’s thematic approach to highlight the renewed and significant institutional growth of interest in Islamic studies for national security concerns. They point as well to the encouragement offered by a number of universities to promote cross-regional approaches, not constrained by narrower definitions of distinct regions, although they also raise the problem of lack of adequate federal funding for such purpos- es. Part III, titled “the Politics of Knowledge,” comprises three chapters by Seteney Sami and Marcial Godoy-Anativia, Ussama Makdisi, and Irene Gendzier; and an ‘Afterward’ by Lisa Anderson. These chapters examine not only the production of knowledge but also how knowledge is frequently silenced by forces that “structure and restrict freedom of speech, censor- ship and self-censorship”—the so-called “chilling effects” (19). Sami and Godoy-Anativia examine the themes of campus watch or surveillance and public criticism of MES, especially after the 9/11 events of 2001, and their impact on academia and “institutional architectures” as knowledge is secu- ritized and “privatized” (19). Makdisi and Gendzier question how Ameri- can scholarship about the region has changed over time, yet almost always highly charged and politicized in large measure due to the Arab-Zionist/ Israeli conflict (20-21). Despite moves toward more critical and postna- tionalist approaches, Makdisi emphasizes that overall academic freedom has nevertheless been curtailed. Genzier, in turn, points to how “ignorance has [come to have] strategic value,” as “caricatured images” pass for anal- ysis (21-22). Finally, given the securitization and other intimidating mea- sures undertaken around campuses and universities, Anderson concludes that the state of a “beleaguered” (442) MES is deplorable, describing it as “demoralized, lacking academic freedom and reliable research data, and function in a general climate of repression, neglect and isolation” (22, 442). This important book—with extensive bibliographies in each chapter and its detailed exploration of the state of the field of United States MES in the twenty-first century—stands as a reference source for all interested in Middle East studies. “Infrastructures for Knowledge” could have made for a provocative main title of this work, in reference to the production of knowledge on the Middle East and the reproduction of new generations of Middle Eastern specialists. Its most salient aspect is that it highlights and underscores the formal and informal authoritarian and securitization mea- sures adopted by US federal agencies as well as universities to set effective restrictions on what can or cannot be said and/or taught about MES, both in academic institutions and in the media. In addition to the proliferation of both private and public watchdogs monitoring how MES is being taught on campuses, the establishment since 2003 of twelve Homeland Security Centers of Excellence at six universities (with grants totaling about 100 million dollars) is indicative of the scale of intrusive measures (101). The broader problem is that such infringements do not take place only in US universities. Given that county’s totalizing and vested interests in influenc- ing how knowledge is produced and consumed globally, not least in and about the Middle East, the extent of its hegemonic control in that region can only be surmised. Amr G.E. SabetDepartment of Political ScienceDalarna University, Falun, Sweden
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/497	Wai-Yip, Ho	Situating Transnational Islam in Nanyang History from the Colonial to the Postcolonial Era: Life Historical Accounts of a Southeast Asian Muslim Family Diaspora	2004-01-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 21 No. 1 (2004): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 1-25	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v21i1.497	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/497/2269	This article explores the changing Southeast Asian Muslim diaspora from the colonial to the postcolonial era. Based on the ethnographic and oral accounts of two Muslim brothers coming from the same Southeast Asian family, and particularly focusing on the diasporic experience of the elder brother’s migration from Pakistan to Hong Kong and finally to Britain, the article shows how the European colonial expansion in Southeast Asia altered the paths of the Muslim diaspora. By comparing the experience of the elder brother in Britain with his younger brother in Hong Kong, this article suggests the importance of agency, in the sense that one’s life history, personal encounter, and different interpretations of Islam are vital determinants as regards their paths in the diaspora and their evaluations toward non-Muslim host societies in both the West and the East.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/498	Marín-Guzmán, Roberto	Some Reflections on the Institutions of Muslim Spain: Unity in Politics and Administration (711-929)	2004-01-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 21 No. 1 (2004): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 26-56	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v21i1.498	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/498/2270	This essay analyzes the major political, military, and administrative institutions of al-Andalus (Muslim Spain) and explains how they gave a sense of unity to the Abode of Islam (dar al-Islam) by replicating the same institutions used in the East (al- Mashriq). The military institutions (e.g., jund, thughur, and husun) helped to keep Muslim Spain safe from enemy attacks, both Christian and Muslim, and to suppress all revolts, while the political institutions enabled the authorities to keep al-Andalus unified, levy taxes, administer the cities (sahib al-madinah), supervise the markets (sahib al-suq), and, finally, to administer the region’s provinces (kuwar).
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/499	O’Shea-Meddour, Wendy	Gothic Horror and Muslim Madness in V. S. Naipaul’s Beyond Belief: ‘Orientalist’ Excursions among the Converted People	2004-01-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 21 No. 1 (2004): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 57-72	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v21i1.499	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/499/2271	This article is written in response to the favorable critical reception that V. S. Naipaul’s writings about the Muslim world have received in mainstream western culture. Since the publication of his travel narratives, Among the Believers and Beyond Belief, Naipaul has enjoyed a reputation as an authority on the Muslim world. The critical acclaim that he has received has been accompanied by official recognition, including a knighthood and the Nobel Prize for Literature. However, many critics beyond the periphery of mainstream western culture have voiced concerns about his hatred of Islam. In this article, I offer a revisionist reading of Naipaul’s most recent Islamic travel narrative, Beyond Belief, arguing that Islamophobia has been disturbingly misinterpreted as expertise. Focusing on three main literary themes – nineteenth-century literary conventions, the gothic genre, and neurosis – I expose this bigoted worldview and call for his status to be reconsidered.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/500	Choudhury, Enamul	The Politics of Symbols and the Symbolization of 9/11	2004-01-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 21 No. 1 (2004): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 73-96	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v21i1.500	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/500/2272	The responses to 9/11 are conferring symbolic meaning on the facts of 9/11. The transformation follows the general pattern of symbolic politics. In the process, Islam is implicated, by default, through three interconnected issues that are driving the discourse of 9/11: global security, the imperatives of modernity, and the reassessment of Islam. Islam is symbolized either in terms of a politics of confrontation or of cooptation. What is left out is the self-understanding of Islam. Contrary to the conventional opinion that Islam as a religion is not at issue, the very meaning of Islam is at stake in the politics of symbols.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/501	Hosen, Nadirsyah	In Search of Islamic Constitutionalism	2004-04-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 21 No. 2 (2004): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 1-24	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v21i2.501	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/501/2265	This article examines the question of whether the Shari`ah is compatible with the principle and procedural form of western constitutionalism. The article will answer this question by looking at the arguments put forth by opponents of Islamic constitutional law and various counter-aguments. Using the substantive approach, I assert that the Shari`ah is compatible with constitutionalism. This position rejects both the fundamentalists’ and the secularists’ views on this subject. The Shari`ah’s principles can be a formal source or an inspiration to a constitution.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/502	Salem, Ahmed Ali	Challenging Authoritarianism, Colonialism, and Disunity: The Islamic Political Reform Movements of al-Afghani and Rida	2004-04-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 21 No. 2 (2004): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 25-54	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v21i2.502	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/502/2266	This paper focuses on the dilemmas that al-Afghani and Rida encountered while advocating and working for political reform: Whenever they fought the tyranny of Muslim rulers, they were targeted, and usually defeated, by colonial powers. And once they began to struggle against colonialism and call for Muslim unity, they were victimized and had their plans aborted by authoritarian Muslim rulers. This was a lesson for later Islamic political movements, as they had to identify clearly, and on solid theoretical bases, their target of reform and the real enemy, and prioritize their goals and methods of reform.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/503	Rashid, Samory	Blacks, the WOI Theory, and Hidden Transcripts	2004-04-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 21 No. 2 (2004): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 55-76	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v21i2.503	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/503/2267	This study offers a rare glimpse into the often hidden world of Islam and Muslims in the Americas as told from the perspective of an indigenous black Muslim born and raised in the United States. In addition to providing a theoretical and methodological critique of the Waves of Immigration (WOI) theory, the dominant theoretical perspective governing studies of Islam and Muslims in the Americas, this study also offers an alternative theoretical perspective designed to provide a more accurate and thorough portrayal of Islam and Muslims in the Americas.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/504	Reda, Nevin	Women in the Mosque: Historical Perspectives on Segregation	2004-04-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 21 No. 2 (2004): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 77-97	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v21i2.504	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/504/2268	This paper deals with the issue of women’s full or partial access to the mosque from 610-925. This period is divided into two timeframes. The first, 610-34, consists mainly of the time in which the Prophet was active in Makkah and Madinah. The second, 634-925, is the period beginning with `Umar’s reign to the time when the Hadith literature was written down and set into the well-known compilations. Two types of evidence are examined for both periods: material and textual records. Material records consist of the layout of the various mosques, where the existence or absence of dividing walls or separate entrances could be important clues. Textual records consist mainly of the Qur’an and Hadith literature. The Qur’an is used as a primary source for the first period, whereas the Hadith literature is used as a primary source for the second period. The Hadith is used to distinguish trends and directions in the Muslim community after the demise of the Prophet, rather than as a source of information on the Prophet himself. This avoids problems of authenticity, while not denying that much of the Hadith may well be authentic. From the primary sources available for the first period, there does not appear to be any evidence of segregation; rather the evidence indicates that women had full access to the mosque. In the second period, three trends appear: a pro-segregation trend, an anti-segregation trend, and a trend that sought to prohibit women from going to the mosque altogether.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/505	Allen, Christopher	Justifying Islamophobia: A Post-9/11 Consideration of the European Union and British Contexts	2004-07-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 21 No. 3 (2004): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 1-25	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v21i3.505	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/505/2259	Immediately prior to the events of 9/11, the United Nations (UN) officially recognized the proliferating climate of anti- Muslim and anti-Islamic prejudice, discrimination, and hatred –Islamophobia – as being as equally repellent and unwanted as anti-Semitism and other global discriminatory phenomena. The 9/11 tragedy, however, somewhat overshadowed this recognition, resulting in the continued proliferation of anti-Muslim and anti-Islamic sentiment and expression. This study explores how and why Islamophobia was manifested following 9/11, contextualizes how elite voices across British and European societies have considered Islamophobia to be fair and justified. In considering the wider findings of the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia’s monitoring of Islamophobia, this study explores how “visual identifiers” have underpinned changes in attitude and reactions to Muslims across the fifteen European Union (EU) member nations at a largely pan-European level. The second section develops these ideas, analyzing three of the report’s primary themes – Muslim visuality, political landscapes (incorporating institutional political elites as well as grassroots politics), and the media – each one approached from the perspective of the United Kingdom. This study concludes by suggesting that 9/11 has made Islamophobia more acceptable, which has enabled its expressions, inferences, and manifestations to locate a newer and possibly more prevalent societal resonance and acceptability. Ultimately, this new development goes some way to justifying Islamophobia and negating the UN’s recognition of this problem.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/506	Abbas, Tahir	After 9/11: British South Asian Muslims, Islamophobia, Multiculturalism, and the State	2004-07-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 21 No. 3 (2004): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 26-38	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v21i3.506	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/506/2260	In light of the events of 9/11 and the subsequent actions and reactions on the part of nation-states in the West and “terrorists” in the East, this paper discusses the concepts of Islamophobia (political and media-manufactured) and multiculturalism in the British context. Rising Islamophobia, state actions, and media reactions to 9/11 have led to changing definitions of the “good multicultural society.” British Muslims are caught in a quagmire: Their loyalties are questioned by a society and polity that is still in the processes of establishing its “Englishness” from its “Britishness,” while growing Islamic political radicalism undermines the already precarious relations between British Muslims and the state.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/507	Yenigun, Halil Ibrahim	Muslims and the Media after 9/11: A Muslim Discourse in the American Media?	2004-07-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 21 No. 3 (2004): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 39-69	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v21i3.507	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/507/2261	This paper seeks to answer two questions: Has there been a shift in the representation of Muslims by the American media in the wake of increasing number of Muslims living here, and could Muslims speak for themselves through an autonomous Muslim discourse in the post-9/11 period? Using the tools of postcolonial analysis, I analyze the coverage on Muslims in the mainstream media following the 9/11 attacks. I find that there was a shift, in the form of a differentiation between moderates and fundamentalists. Additionally, the same tropes used to represent Muslims in the colonial discourse were now employed to the fundamentalist “Other.” Muslims could speak up; however, this could not avoid reproducing the dominant discourse. Yet, the presence of a significant Muslim minority offers opportunities for broadened boundaries of “American” citizenry that can be realized by growing activism to this end.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/508	Gallagher, Nancy	Liberating Afghan Women	2004-07-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 21 No. 3 (2004): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 70-88	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v21i3.508	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/508/2262	Public opinion in the United States and elsewhere celebrated the liberation of Afghan women following the defeat of the Taliban government. The United States promised to stay in Afghanistan and foster security, economic development, and human rights for all, especially women. After years of funding various anti- Soviet Mujahidin warlords, the United States had agreed to help reconstruct the country once before in 1992, when the Soviet-backed government fell, but had lost interest when the warlords began to fight among themselves. This time, however, it was going to be different. To date, however, conditions have not improved for most Afghan women and reconstruction has barely begun. How did this happen? This article explores media presentations of Afghan women and then compares them with recent reports from human rights organizations and other eyewitness accounts. It argues that the media depictions were built on earlier conceptions of Muslim societies and allowed us to adopt a romantic view that disguised or covered up the more complex historical context of Afghan history and American involvement in it. We allowed ourselves to believe that Afghans were exotic characters who were modernizing or progressing toward a western way of life, despite the temporary setback imposed by the Taliban government. In Afghanistan, however, there was a new trope: the feminist Afghan woman activist. Images of prominent Afghan women sans burqa were much favored by the mass media and American policymakers. The result, however, was not a new focus on funding feminist political organizations or making women’s rights a foreign policy priority; rather, it was an unwillingness to fulfill obligations incurred during decades of American-funded mujahidin warfare, to face the existence of deteriorating conditions for women, resumed opium cultivation, and a resurgent Taliban, or to commit to a multilateral approach that would bring in the funds and expertise needed to sustain a long-term process of reconstruction.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/509	Stockdale, Nancy L.	“Citizens of Heaven” versus “The Islamic Peril”: The Anti-Islamic Rhetoric of Orlando’s Holy Land Experience Since 9/11/01	2004-07-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 21 No. 3 (2004): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 89-109	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v21i3.509	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/509/2263	In early 2001, the Holy Land Experience (HLE) theme park opened in Orlando, Florida. Before 9/11, Islam was merely a shadowy figure at the HLE; after 9/11, however, the park has promoted a vision of Islam and Muslims that fosters hate among American Protestant visitors. This paper argues that the HLE is a site of extreme potential danger, for it espouses holy war and dissent between American Christians, Jews, and Muslims.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/510	Zine, Jasmin	Anti-Islamophobia Education as Transformative Pedadogy: Reflections from the Educational Front Lines	2004-07-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 21 No. 3 (2004): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 110-119	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v21i3.510	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/510/2264	The aftermath of 9/11 and the corresponding rise of global militarism and imperialism have had deep consequences for the realities of Muslims around the world. The reemergence of Orientalist representations have provided the ideological justifications for military incursions. This short reflective article outlines the challenge that critical educators faced in developing an epistemological and pedagogical framework and resources for anti-Islamophobia education in response to the resurgence of neo-Orientalist politics and representations.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/511	Kersten, Carool	The Predicament of Thailand’s Southern Muslims	2004-10-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 21 No. 4 (2004): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 1-29	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v21i4.511	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/511/2256	Recent events in Southeast Asia have revived interest in the role of political Islam in the region. This article examines the position of Muslims in Thailand’s four southern border provinces. It addresses the historical background of the area’s relationship with forms of centralized government by Thai political centers, the relevant elements of ethnicity and their significance for cultural (religious) self-identification, and how this may be translated in the political use of Islam. In a wider context, the study can be considered as illustrative of the problematic relationship between centers and peripheries, particularly those on the frontiers of culture zones.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/512	Yousif, Ahmad F.	Islamic Revivalism in Malaysia: An Islamic Response to Non-Muslim Concerns	2004-10-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 21 No. 4 (2004): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 30-56	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v21i4.512	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/512/2257	This paper briefly reviews some of the causes, manifestations, and effects of the growing Islamic revivalism in Malaysia. It also examines the non-Muslim minorities’ concerns about this rising Islamic consciousness and provides an Islamic response. Finally, the extent to which the events of 9/11 changed the dynamics between ethno-religious minorities and the government is briefly assessed.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/513	Marín-Guzmán, Roberto	Arab Tribes, the Umayyad Dynasty, and the `Abbasid Revolution	2004-10-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 21 No. 4 (2004): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 57-96	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v21i4.513	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/513/2258	This essay analyzes the role played by the Arab tribes in the expansion of Islam, the consolidation of Dar al-Islam [House of Islam], as well as in power and administration during the Umayyad dynasty. Given the traditional rivalries between the Mudar and the Qahtan tribes, each confederation of tribes led the expansion of Islam in a different direction: the Mudar toward the east, and the Qahtan toward the west. The Umayyads controlled power by exploiting tribal disputes. The same practice, skillfully used by the `Abbasids, expelled the Umayyads from power and ushered in a new dynasty.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/514	Dirks, Jerald F.	A Survey of Christian Religious Education in the United States	2003-01-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 20 No. 1 (2003): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 1-19	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v20i1.514	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/514/2291	Prior to the landmark Supreme Court decision of June 1963, which banned public prayer from the public schools, Christian religious education was often a routine part of the overt instruction provided by the American public school system. However, in the wake of that legal milestone, even though instruction in the Judeo-Christian interpretation of religious history continued to be taught covertly, American churches began relying more heavily on providing Christian religious education. This article briefly presents Christianity’s contemporary status in the United States and reviews such religious education methods as Sunday school, vacation Bible school, Christian youth groups, catechism, private Christian schools, Youth Sunday, and children’s sermons. The survey concludes with a look at the growing interface between such education and the lessons of psychology as well as training and certifying Christian religious educators.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/515	Ahmad, Ahrar	Islam and Democracy: Text, Tradition, and History	2003-01-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 20 No. 1 (2003): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 20-45	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v20i1.515	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/515/2292	This paper challenges the popular perception that Islam and democracy are incompatible, and argues that the lack of democracy in some Muslim countries is not because of Islam but in spite of it. This argument will be developed in two stages. First, it will consider the legal–ethical order embedded in Islam’s text (the Qur’an) and tradition (prophetic example) to consider the democratic implications inherent in that construction. Second, it will explore three “high periods” of Islamic rule to consider their progressive, inclusive, and democratic tendencies. It will suggest that the current problems of democracy experienced by many Muslim countries are not necessarily caused by factors intrinsic to Islam, but by forces external to those areas.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/516	Barlas, Asma	Jihad, Holy War, and Terrorism: The Politics of Conflation and Denial	2003-01-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 20 No. 1 (2003): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 46-62	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v20i1.516	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/516/2293	In the wake of 9/11, the Islamic concept of jihad has been described as both “holy war” and “terrorism.” In this paper, I unpack this twofold conflation within the context of a broader discussion of the problem of some Muslims’ interpretive extremism and the West’s long-standing and willful politics of misrecognition of Islam.2 This politics confuses Islam with Muslims; disregards the role of political, economic, cultural, and historical factors in shaping Muslims’ attitudes, actions, and readings of Islam; and denies western complicity in creating conducive conditions for extremism. In critiquing both Muslims and non-Muslims, the idea is to alert them to what may equally be at stake for them in the egalitarian readings of Islam.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/517	Pramanik, Ataul Huq	Development Strategy and Its Implications for Unity in the Muslim World	2003-01-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 20 No. 1 (2003): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 63-87	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v20i1.517	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/517/2294	This paper seeks to achieve the following objectives: to discuss the idea of unity from the Islamic and secular perspectives; to test empirically how the absence of certain universal values (virtues) in the pursued development strategies shattered unity and thereby led to the Ummah’s disintegration; to examine how the interrelationships between growth and democracy can promote unity by creating a civil society through higher human development; and to examine the Organization of the Islamic Conference’s (OIC) role in strengthening unity among diverse Muslim communities.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/518	Sinanovic, Ermin	Humanitarian Intervention in International and Islamic Law	2003-01-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 20 No. 1 (2003): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 88-106	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v20i1.518	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/518/2295	In this paper, I look into the moral foundation of humanitarian intervention in international law and its Islamic counterpart. My objective is to identify the traits shared by both sets of laws, and to see if the same or similar justification can be used across cultures to reach the same goal. In other words, one goal is to assess the claims that the basis upon which humanitarian intervention is justified has a universal appeal. Both international and Islamic law justify humanitarian intervention on moral grounds. International law bases its justification upon the human rights discourse. Islamic law provides enough bases for legitimizing humanitarian intervention, and Qur’anic verses, scholarly opinions, and Islamic principles provide a sound background for it. Paramount in this task is the concept of human dignity (karamah al-insan). We found no disagreement on this fundamental issue between the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and Islamic law. Human dignity, as understood in international human rights and its Islamic counterpart, thus could form the jus cogens of international law, a common human heritage upon which everybody can agree.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/519	Kausar, Zeenath	A Philosophical Critique of Nationalism: Reflections of Iqbal	2003-04-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 20 No. 2 (2003): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 1-25	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v20i2.519	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/519/2305	In this paper, I explore Iqbal’s views on nationalism, not only in the context of the Indian subcontinent but also in general terms as well. I contend that Iqbal’s political philosophy is mainly inspired by the Islamic concept of tawhid. His profound reflections on the unity of life, the unity of the Islamic ummah, and the unity of humanity based upon the concept of tawhid strike the root of secularism and nationalism. His philosophy of “self” (khudi) and his conception of the Islamic social order also are discussed briefly in order to elucidate some of his views on humanity and the Islamic mission, which stand in complete contradiction to nationalism.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/520	Hasan, Aznan	An Introduction to Collective Ijtihad (Ijtihad Jama‘i): Concept and Applications	2003-04-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 20 No. 2 (2003): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 26-49	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v20i2.520	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/520/2307	This article explores the concept of collective ijtihad as a means of determining new judicial judgments. Accordingly, it analyzes the theoretical framework of this kind of ijtihad and its application by discussing the various institutions that practice it. In general, this article seeks to present this as a practical mechanism for ascertaining the Shari‘ah’s opinion concerning the Muslim ummah on a variety of current issues. At the outset, it will present briefly the controversy concerning the closure of the gate of ijtihad, for this kind of ijtihad relies heavily upon our recognition that, throughout the history of Islamic law, jurists have never abandoned the task of ijtihad.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/521	Paya, Ali	Karl Popper and the Iranian Intellectuals	2003-04-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 20 No. 2 (2003): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 50-79	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v20i2.521	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/521/2308	The ways in which Popper’s ideas have been introduced to Iranian society will be discussed, and the reactions of several prominent Iranian intellectual groups, namely, the leftists, the Heideggerians, the religious conservatives, the religious intel- lectuals and the moderate seculars, to Popper’s views will be critically appraised.The upshot of the paper is that while Popper’s views have been used and misused in the power struggle between various groups in post-revolutionary Iran, they also have been instrumental in creating collective intentionalities and shared understandings con- cerning a range of important concepts in such diverse fields as epistemology, politics, culture, social action, and religious beliefs.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/522	Afsaruddin, Asma	Medieval Islamic Discourse on Legitimate Leadership and Its Modern Implications	2003-04-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 20 No. 2 (2003): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 80-94	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v20i2.522	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/522/2309	Although the Qur’an does not mandate a specific form of government, it provides broad moral directives for sound political governance. The Qur’an further refers to two specific traits in the legitimate leaders of the Muslim (and any other righteous) polity: precedence and moral excellence, two concepts which were understood to have considerable socio-political implications as well. In the secondary, extra-Qur’anic literature, there is extensive commentary on these two traits and their significance for defining legitimate leadership. This article traces the broad contours of this extended discussion and refers to its continuing relevance in our own times. It further indicates points of similarity between this discursive treatment of leadership and some aspects of the modern electoral system.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/523	Kazimov, Necva B.	Egypt’s Reservations to the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women and Women’s Rights in Egypt	2003-10-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 20 No. 3-4 (2003): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 1-45	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v20i3-4.523	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/523/2298	This paper addresses the role that the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) can play to improve women’s conditions and secure their rights in Egypt, in light of that country’s religious-based reservations to the UN convention and its recent constitutional amendment making the Shari`ah its principle source of legislation. Specifically, it addresses Egypt’s reservations to Article 16, which concerns the eradication of discrimination against women in cases of divorce, as this area has been the focus of recent legislative reform. The paper is limited to Egypt, because it is the leading Muslim state in providing women’s rights in the area of family law.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/524	Malkawi, Fathi	The Future of Muslim Education in the United States: An Agenda for Research	2003-10-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 20 No. 3-4 (2003): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 46-82	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v20i3-4.524	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/524/2299	This paper addresses some of the Muslim community’s concerns regarding its children’s education and reflects upon how education has shaped the position of other communities in American history. It argues that the future of Muslim education will be influenced directly by the present realities and future trends within American education in general, and, more importantly, by the well-calculated and informed short-term and long-term decisions and future plans taken by the Muslim community. The paper identifies some areas in which a wellestablished knowledge base is critical to making decisions, and calls for serious research to be undertaken to furnish this base.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/525	Noordin, Mohamad Fauzan	Wisdom: The Missing Dimension in Information and Communication Technology (ICT)	2003-10-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 20 No. 3-4 (2003): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 83-104	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v20i3-4.525	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/525/2300	The levels of knowledge hierarchy (i.e., data, information, knowledge, and wisdom), are described in the Qur’an, the ahadith, and the literature produced during Islamic civilization’s Golden Age. They also have been discussed by western and non-Muslim scholars. However, while implementing and using information and communication technology (ICT), only the first three levels are currently being explored and utilized. Wisdom has not been discussed to any great extent. ICT has designed systems to assist us and has improved our life and work. However, such tools as decision-support systems and executive information systems comprise only data, information, and knowledge. Comprehensiveness does not guarantee the possession of wisdom. Taking things apart is knowledge; putting things together is wisdom. Muslim scholars of the Golden Age analyzed data, drew relationships and interpreted data to create information, identified and determined the pattern to represent knowledge, and understood the foundational principles for the patterns to implement wisdom. Wisdom must be included if ICT is to be complete. People, organizations, and the nation must strive for wisdom as the ultimate goal: from an information society to a knowledge society to a wisdom society, and from information workers to knowledge workers to wisdom workers.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/526	Ahmad, Imad-ad-Dean	On the American Constitution from the Perspective of the Qur’an and the Madinah Covenant	2003-10-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 20 No. 3-4 (2003): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 105-124	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v20i3-4.526	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/526/2301	This paper explores the insights provided by an analysis of the compatibility of democracy and constitutionalism with Islamic law. Such a discussion would benefit from an assessment of aspects of the United States Constitution in light of the Qur’an and the Madinah Covenant. The issues explored include the permissibility of man-made constitutions in Islamic law, the goals of such constitutions, the relative roles of positive law and discovery, the separation of powers, the specification of principles as opposed to mechanisms of government, succession, treason, slavery, racism, amendment, separation of state and religion, human rights, private property, and unenumerated rights.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/527	Perry, Glenn E.	Popular Sovereignty, Islam, and Democracy	2003-10-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 20 No. 3-4 (2003): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 125-139	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v20i3-4.527	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/527/2303	This article examines the idea that Islam’s rejection of popular sovereignty makes it incompatible with democracy. I show instead that sovereignty (“absolute despotic power,” popular or otherwise) is a sterile, pedantic, abstruse, formalistic, and legalistic concept, and that democracy should be seen as involving “popular control” rather than “popular sovereignty.” Divine sovereignty would be inconsistent with democracy only if that meant – unlike in Islam – rule by persons claiming to be God or His infallible representatives. A body of divine law that humans cannot change would be incompatible with democracy only if it were so comprehensive as to leave no room for political decisions.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/528	Ironside, Pernille	Reconciling Rights and Obligations: An Examination of Shari`ah Penal Reform in Northern Nigeria	2003-10-01	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 20 No. 3-4 (2003): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 140-172	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v20i3-4.528	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/528/2304	This article examines the debate concerning the recent reinstatement of Shari`ah law with respect to criminal matters in Northern Nigeria. The discussion explores the inherent challenges in reconciling the equally entrenched and passionate views of pro-Shari`ah supporters on their right to freedom of religion with those that question its application in terms of human rights norms and obligations, and its constitutional legality. The analysis concludes that Shari`ah laws can coexist with Nigeria’s common law system and remain relevant in the context of Islam, provided that its principles are adapted and modernized to comport with international standards for due process and are interpreted and applied consistently.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/543	Butterworth, Charles E.	Rethinking Reform in Higher Education, From Islamization to Integration of Knowledge: by Ziauddin Sardar and Jeremy Henzell-Thomas	2019-01-17	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 36 No. 1 (2019): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v36i1.543	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/543/87	This volume, one of the most important and timely publications of the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), represents the latest effort by scholars associated with the organization to formulate an educational program for Muslims. Ziauddin Sardar and Jeremy Henzell-Thomas revise and update the attempts by Ismail Faruqi and fellow founders of IIIT in the 1980s to address the crisis of education faced then by Muslim societies.That is appropriate, for the crisis has not disappeared with the passage of time. If anything, it has become greater and now encompasses Muslims worldwide—not just those in Muslim societies. And, as the authors of this volume note repeatedly, it has captured the attention of educators in the US, UK, and most other European nations.Now, eschewing the older Islamization of knowledge approach, Sardar and Henzell-Thomas propose the integration of knowledge. They set aside the old paradigm while offering minimal comments about the shortcomings that warrant such a change, perhaps so as to avoid giving rise to unnecessary quarrels. Major attention must be accorded, therefore, what the authors understand integration of knowledge to be and how it might address the needs of their specific audience—Muslim societies. One must wonder, all the same, why the audience is so defined. After all, the crisis of education affects people everywhere, Muslims in Muslim and non-Muslim societies as well as non-Muslims living in Muslim and non-Muslim societies. How do differences in political and economic problems faced by these various groups affect the educational goals to be achieved and who is affected by them?Another preliminary objection concerns the way both the earlier IIIT reformers and those involved in the new project ignore or neglect the critique of shortcomings in educational approaches launched in the US early in the twentieth century by Robert Maynard Hutchins and Mortimer Adler, a critique that culminated in the Great Books movement. It, or, more accurately, offshoots of it, have given rise to attempts at general or liberal education in numerous American and European institutions. Especially pertinent for the integration of knowledge project is how these offshoots of the Great Books movement, ostensibly centered on Western writings at the outset, have gradually come to incorporate fundamental texts from the Golden Age of the Arabic and Islamic tradition. Today more than ever, it is essential to promote the cultural phenomena common to all. Only greater awareness of the extent to which we are one people will allow us to counter those who seek to divide us and thereby fuel enmity.Finally, no attention is accorded here to how the issues identified with the crisis of education are addressed in other faith traditions or to the way members of those traditions attempt to integrate the teachings of revealed texts with ones arising from simple human reasoning. Such a broader focus would have permitted the authors to propose an approach that might resonate with the general malaise expressed by many educators and suggest a way forward that all, not just Muslims, could embrace.Still, these preliminary objections are just that, preliminary. To assess their merit, it is essential to consider carefully what is actually proposed in the volume under review. It consists of a Foreword setting forth the basic principles of the revised project and four chapters. The first, “Mapping the Terrain,” is by Sardar, as is the second, “From Islamization to Integration of Knowledge.” Henzell-Thomas is the author of the third and fourth chapters, “The Integration We Seek” and “Towards a Language of Integration.”
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/546	Fazeli, Saman	Engineers of Jihad: The Curious Connection between Violent Extremism and Education By Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog	2020-05-16	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 37 No. 1-2 (2020): American Journal of Islam and Society; 174-176	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v37i1-2.546	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/546/419	Perhaps it’s hard to imagine an engineer who is also a poet. After all, there seems to be a stark difference between the skills required by each profession. The dichotomy is undergirded by the notion that—whether engineering conditions engineers to act in particular ways, or engineers are born with a certain mindset—engineers possess certain traits, which lead them to do some things rather than others. The present title, Engineers of Jihad, examines the connection between education and another trait: the capacity for violence. The authors are particularly interested in why there is a disproportionate number (indeed, a significant overrepresentation) of engineers among the ranks of Muslim extremists. Based on this observation, they conclude that engineers are more prone to radicalization than other university graduates (11-16). Although the data could be explained by another hypothesis (there is a higher demand for engineers in extremistgroups), the authors maintain that engineers possess certain character traits that predispose them to radicalization (164). To read the full book review, download the PDF file on the right.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/547	Perkins, Alisa	Muslims at the American Vigil: LGBTQ Advocacy, Faith, and Public Mourning	2019-10-07	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 36 No. 4 (2019): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 26-60	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v36i4.547	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/547/1913	The 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting at a gay dance club in Florida fomented a surge in Islamophobia, as pundits blamed the perpetrator’s Muslim identity for his hateful act. In the aftermath of the violence, vigils across the United States offered forums for Muslim American and other groups to publically express their shared grief and to address homophobia and Islamophobia together. The people affected most intensely by the tragedy were LGBTQ Muslims, who were simultaneously subjected to both intensified homophobia and Islamophobia in the wake of the shooting. This local ethnographic study of Orlando vigils in Michigan examines how the Orlando aftermath encouraged debate about the issue of LGBTQ Muslim visibility and conversation about the potential for Muslim civic leaders and mosque leaders to serve as their allies. During the Orlando vigils, LGBTQ Muslims, allies, and faith leaders drew on, negotiated, and/or resisted various repertoires of mourning and advocacy. Their responses to the Orlando moment provide valuable information about how connections among faith, sexuality, race, and protest are shaping the emergence of LGBTQ Muslim visibilities in the United States today.
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/548	Bacchus, Nazreen	Resisting Islamophobia: Muslims Seeking American Integration Through Spiritual Growth, Community Organizing, and Political Activism By Nazreen S. Bacchus	2019-10-07	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 36 No. 4 (2019): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 1-26	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v36i4.548	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/548/1912	Since 9/11, second-generation Muslims have experienced an increase in religious discrimination that has presented several challenges to their American integration. Scholars have noted that Muslims are often marginalized and “othered” because of their religious beliefs, attire choices and non-Western ethnic origins. In New York, Arabs, South Asians and Africans are the predominant ethnic groups practicing Islam. Although Muslim communities are ethnically and racially diverse, they are categorized in ways that have transformed their religious identity into a racialized group. This new form of racial amalgamation is not constructed on underlying skin color similarities but on their religious adherence to Islam. The War on Terror has complicated the image of Muslims by circulating Islamophobia, or the fear of Muslims and Islam, onto American society. Political rhetoric targeting Muslim communities has also incited new ways of misinterpreting Qur’anic text to further marginalize them. Second-generation Muslim Americans are responding to Islamophobia by reframing the negative depictions about their identities through community-based activism. This paper takes an intersectionality approach to understanding how Muslims across the New York metro area are managing their religious identities as they seek to develop a sense of belonging in American society. This ethnographic case study addresses how second-generation Muslims are resisting Islamophobia through community building, civic engagement, and college student associations. Countering Islamophobia has become part of the everyday life experience for Muslims in New York and is currently their main trajectory for integration into American society. 
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/549	Daniels, Timothy Patrick	Blackamerican Muslim Scholars and Leaders in New York City: Sidelining American Islamophobia and Misrepresentations	2019-10-07	American Journal of Islam and Society; Vol. 36 No. 4 (2019): American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; 61-88	The International Institute of Islamic Thought	eng	10.35632/ajis.v36i4.549	https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/download/549/1914	Recent work has drawn attention to the state-led and media-driven discourse of good" and "bad" Muslims. It is a flexible discourse, with benchmarks and shifting appraisals, that aims to mold American Muslims into "good" secular Muslims. Drawing on old Orientalist representations, this American Islamophobic framework strives to produce "good" Blackamerican Muslims through rendering them as invisible, voiceless, or under the control of allies of the U.S. secular power. The three ethnographic vignettes—a masjid fundraiser, two chaplains, and a political collective—demonstrate that Blackamerican Muslims scholars and leaders are not only disrupting this discursive project, but also undermining negative portrayals of Muslims and Islam more broadly. In addition, through their practice and discourse, these Blackamerican Muslim figures are formulating an emergent American Muslim religious identity.	nan	26	.pdf	application/pdf	9063	462	52	İslami bilgi ve vahyin sosyal bilimlerle bütünleştirilmesi sürecinde zorluk- lar bulunsa da İslam Hukuku ve Fıkıh gibi alanlarda İslam›ın büyük hedefleri (içtihat ve makâsıdü’ş-şerîa) Tamir Moustafa, Constituting Religion: Islam, Liberal Rights, and the Malay- sian State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018). '' !#$%&%'$(!)%*+%,-.(/)%!0!1,#0)!(!0#%2+03'$'4%!)+0'5! larında faaliyet göstermektedir.[10] Üniversitede ayrıca üç enstitü -Helal Araştırma ve Eğitim Enstitüsü (IN- HART), İslami Bankacılık ve Finans Enstitüsü (IIBF) ve Uluslararası İslam Medeniyeti ve Malay Dünyası Enstitüsü (ISTAC)- ve İslam Ekonomisi Merkezi bulunmaktadır.	cache/ajiss-3645.pdf	txt/ajiss-3645.txt